Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Thirty-One

"As long as you have," he said confidently, but when my eyes went flat and I shot a bullet of disbelief in his direction, his shoulders rolled forward. "Give or take a few days."

I still wasn't buying it. "You literally ran into an explosion to tell her—"

"I ran into the explosion because there was a chance that she was in there," he said, stronger now than before. "But it doesn't matter, because I didn't find her. I just yelled in there and told everyone to get the hell out, because there was a chance she was in there. I didn't know for sure."

"You expect me to believe that?" I said.

"Do you know why I go around telling the truth all the time?" he asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. He just watched me, making sure that I was paying close attention when he said, "It's so that people believe me when I need them to. I need you to believe me right now, Morgan. It's the only way this is going to work."

"Well I don't," I said. "I'm sorry, but I don't believe that you would run into a building that you knew was going to blow, just because you thought she might be in there."

"So you're telling me that if Matt were in there, you would have stayed back?"

And, well, I couldn't argue that point. We already knew, without a doubt, exactly what measures I would have taken to get Matt out of that cabin, because I had taken those measures to get Matt out of that cabin. The proof was right there.

"You could have told me," I said instead. "You should have said something as soon as you suspected—"

"I did say something," he said. He wasn't exactly angry, but he certainly wasn't backing down. He certainly wasn't going to let me win this one and, to tell you the truth, I was glad for it. I hoped he never let me win—not now, not ever. I hoped that Luke Collins and I kept fighting for a very long time. "After Romania, I told Agent Baxter everything I knew and she told your dad. Your dad probably told everyone else because by the time I started working with your mom, she was pulling me along on missions as an inside source."

"That's why they let you go everywhere," and suddenly I felt stupid. Of course that was the reason. Even without his sister, he was a valuable informant—Captain of the Gathering and a longtime apprentice to Blake Hughes. Add his sister into the mix and he was the perfect source. "God, I should have seen it."

"I'm sorry I didn't fill you in sooner," he said. "I should have told you that night, in front of the fire. I wanted to, but I just—you called me Luke."

"What's that got to—?"

"Everyone else calls me Collins," he said, brown eyes stuck on me. They were glass again—it was always glass or stone with him, never in between. "Everyone else looks at me and they see her. They see my parents. But you call me Luke."

And just like that, it clicked. "And you call me Morgan."

A smile, not even halved this time. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I call you Morgan."

Not Maggie. Not Goode. Morgan. To him, I was Morgan, and I wasn't my father's daughter, nor was I the descendant of Catherine Goode. I had the sudden urge to curl up against him and never leave, desperate to erase the words of Blake Hughes from my mind. Oh boy, are you ever her granddaughter.

"I'm not crazy," I said.

He didn't miss a beat. "I know."

"I'm nothing like her."

He already knew who I was talking about. "I know."

"What if she wasn't the bad guy?"

This time, there was a pause. This time, he didn't answer straight away and I knew—I just knew—that he was thinking it too. I knew that Lily's words were fresh in his mind and that there was a chance that we were on the wrong side of everything.

"My parents killed a lot of people," I said.

"A lot of bad people," he said back, but in that moment, the boy who told only told truths didn't sound all that sure.

"Yeah," I said, because I was allowed to lie, and Luke has a far easier time listening to lies than he does telling them. "Of course. Bad people."

"Now boarding: flight 455 to Boston," said the voice above us.

And what else could we do? The two of us could spend hours in that airport, debating the finer morals of good versus evil, or we could get on our plane and do our damn jobs. We could gather our things and we could move on.

So that was what we did. Luke grabbed his bag, I grabbed mine. Scout carried both his and Matt's while Matt complained to Alice about how he was an independent guy and he didn't need his boyfriend to do all the heavy lifting. Alice just smiled—that same smile she always wore whenever Ellie left—and she listened ever so patiently to one of her oldest friends.

Mom lead up the rear and let her arm fall around my shoulders. "You doing okay, kiddo?"

I smiled up at her, but all I saw was the word responsible scribbled across her forehead. "I'm doing just fine—did you get ahold of Macey?"

She shook her head. "No, but they're going to be okay. Macey's good."

"Macey's really good," I agreed.

"They'll be fine," she said again, and I think she really meant it. Some part of Mom, deep, deep down, believed that things like international terror and lifelong grudges really did work out in the end. Some part of me, deep, deep down, really wanted to believe her. "We're all going to be just fine."

I looked up to Luke. Maybe he agreed with her and maybe he didn't. It was hard to get a read on him, but either way, I laced my fingers through his. I walked through the gates with my mother's arm around my shoulders and with Luke's hand in mine and I thought, just for a moment, that maybe Mom was right.

Maybe we were going to be okay.