Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

27

Savannah

We werequiet on the drive back from my house. Well…Samantha Long’s house. Not mine. It had never been mine.

I laid down across the back seat and closed my eyes. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all on the long drive through the night, as we made our way to my adopted hometown. I tried. I was exhausted. But it hadn’t worked.

I wasn’t sure why I’d been so on edge. It wasn’t that I thought we were headed into danger. I’d felt the sting of imminent danger every second since I’d seen that black sedan screeching to a stop at the curb in front of us. And, honestly, to a lesser extent, since the night the Marshals took us away when I was sixteen.

In many ways, the low-grade dread that accompanied the threat of danger was like an old friend, now. It was like fuel. I wouldn’t know what to do without that hum in the back of my mind.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the idea of being in my “new” town, in my “new” house, where my “new” identity lived—with Gage.

He was part of my real town, my real home. The real me. He was the part that I’d hung onto all these years, so tightly that sometimes I thought I’d break my fingers from clenching them so hard.

He was how I had kept some part of Savannah alive, and not completely lost myself to Samantha.

But, now Gage had entered Samantha’s world. He had seen the streets she lived on, driven past the store where she grocery shopped, stood in her house.

That made “Samantha” real to me in a way she never had been before. I think on some level, I must’ve known that would happen. That was why I had been so scared to go there, and to take Gage.

I didn’t want her to be real. I didn’t want that life to be real. I wanted to keep thinking of it the same way I had for the last dozen years—as an interlude. A bad dream that, if I just waited long enough, I would wake up from.

But now, I was facing the truth. That life had been real. That life had stolen more than a decade from me. It had stolen my father.

I tried to shove that knowledge down the same way I’d been shoving everything else down for so long. But it wasn’t working.

There was no imminent threat. There were a dozen hours in the car stretching ahead of me, where I had no responsibilities except to…exist. That was a perfect time to think, and thinking was the last thing I wanted to do.

I closed my eyes, tried to lose myself in the sweet oblivion of sleep. If I was lucky, maybe I could sleep for the entire twelve hour drive. Not wake up until we were back at Bear’s fortress of solitude. Then, maybe there would be some kind of distracting action to take. Or, if the plan was just to shower and go to bed—at least Gage would be lying next to me.

Even if he didn’t want me anymore—wouldn’t touch me, even to hold my hand like he’d done in the motel—at least I would feel the weight of him on the other side of the bed. Would hear his steady breathing. Would feel the heat coming off of his body, warming me even across the expanse of mattress.

That would be comforting. And maybe it would help me feel more like Savannah again. Because as of right now, I was feeling a hell of a lot like Samantha, and I hated it.