Sloane looks startled by the question, like she wasn’t expecting me to worry about her climbing out of a moving vehicle in the middle of a busy street, which is the bare fucking minimum in my opinion. What kind of robots has this woman dated?

    I nearly passed out when she started to fall out of the SUV into traffic, her life shing before my damn eyes. From the quirky girl in that tweenedy to the teen ingenue dying in a horror movie to now. I’m freaked out, worried, and riding one hell of an adrenaline rush, but as I stare down at the surprise in her gold-flecked eyes, I’m doing my best not to show any of it.

    “I’m sorry,” she says after a minute. “I shouldn’t have—”

    “I’m not asking you to be sorry,” I say. “I’m asking you to exin. Did the driver try to take a photo? Did I do something to make you ufortable? Did you suddenly get ustrophobic? What?”

    Her surprise turns to shock. “You really don’t know?”

    “I really don’t,” I answer, my gaze locked with hers.

    She starts to say something—I can tell whatever it is that upset her is on the tip of her tongue. But then she just shakes her head. “Let’s just forget it. It was no big deal.”

    She moves past me, head down, shoulders hunched in on herself, and my heart aches.

    Which is why I’m so careful when I tug on her wrist until she’s once again facing me. “I’m not about to just move on when you almost got hurt. Just tell me what I missed, and I promise it won’t happen again.”

    “It’s not your job to protect me,” she tosses back. “I’m a grown woman. If I did jump out of an SUV, it’s no one’s responsibility but my own.”

    “Bullshit.” The word is out before I can stop it, more raw than I mean it to be. Her eyes widen, and I force myself to take a breath. I don’t want to intimidate her—I just want her to be okay.

    “Excuse me?” In an instant, the waif is gone. The ck Widow rises again.

    Good. Because I can’t fight someone when they’re down, let alone Sloane. “I’m the reason you were in that SUV, and I need to know what set you off, so I know how to prevent it next time.”

    “Next time?” She gives me a pissed-off look that ups the ante on the emotions roiling around inside of me. “That’s one hell of an assumption, Sly. Who says there’s going to be a next time?”

    Her words bring me up cold, exactly as she means them to. And fine, maybe this is the only time we’ll ever have together. But that only makes me more determined to know what happened in that SUV. Because she was right there with me, right up until she wasn’t.

    Right up until she threw herself out of a moving vehicle to get away.

    The truth hits me like a two-by-four. And even though everything inside me is screaming at me to wrap Sloane up, to keep her safe, to hold on to her and make sure she never feels like she has to do something so reckless again, I force myself to back up and give her some space.

    It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, second only to backing off when Lucia—

    I shut the thought down before it can fully form. This is nothing like what happened to my sister. This is about Sloane.

    “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

    She looks startled, like those are thest two words she expected to hear. Which makes me feel like an ass for getting so upset.

    “I don’t have the right to ask anything of—”

    “It was the song!” she shouts, and now she’s wrapping her arms around herself like she’s bracing for a blow. “You didn’t do anything, Sly. It was the fucking song on the radio, okay? I can’t listen to it. I can’t be around it. I can’t even think about it or I—”

    Her voice breaks. She shakes her head as she steps backward, eyes roaming like she’s looking for somewhere to hide.

    “The song?” I ask, trying desperately to remember what was ying when Sloane freaked out. But I was so busy being with her and thinking about the song that had just yed—her song—that whatever random song came on next hadn’t even registered.

    Except it obviously wasn’t random to her.

    “What was it?” I ask, taking a step closer. But she just moves farther away, grows just a little bit smaller, and I hate it.

    She’s been holding those walls up so long, I don’t think she knows how to let them down, even when she’s breaking behind them. And fuck if I wouldn’t deconstruct them by hand just to help her breathe. If she would only give me the word.

    “Don’t act like you don’t know.” Her voice is trembling so hard that it scares me. Just like the rest of her.

    “I don’t. I swear.” I rack my brain, trying to figure out what would cause this reaction. Then it hits me. This isn’t about the song. It’s about the artist.

    Acid burns in my stomach at the thought. “Was it a Jarrod Bowers song?”

    Sheughs, and the sound is so harsh that it’s hard to hear. “It was the Jarrod Bowers song.” She looks around, at the carousel that doesn’t run anymore and the observatory in the distance. Basically, anywhere and everywhere but at me.

    And I hate that, almost as much as I hate my own ignorance right now. Despite abu Ximena’s deep and abiding adoration for Sloane, until very recently I’d never paid much attention to her beyond listening to my abu talk about her. Now that I am paying attention, I figured that if things worked out with us, it would be up to her to tell me what she wanted me to know about her history.

    I mean, I know the basics. She was dating Hayden Jeffries when he died in a car ident, and a few yearster, she was engaged to Jarrod Bowers when he drowned. That’s how she got her ck Widow moniker, which seemed cruel to me, even at the time, considering how much their deaths must have hurt.

    “I’m sorry.” It’s the most mundane thing I can say, but I truly can’t think of anything else to tell her. “You must have loved him very much, and it sucks that his music brings all that back to you. Is there anything—”

    “Are you serious?” she demands. She’s gone from hugging herself to putting her hands on her hips as she stares at me incredulously. “You really don’t know what song I’m talking about? And why it hurts too much for me to hear it?”