Page 38 of The Villain

“I’ll be in the garage with Ty if you need me.” And then she was gone.

Chapter Seven

Athena

Icarefully felt for the nightstand, my fingers instinctively finding the familiar barrier of pill bottles, a water bottle, and tissues along the edge.

Everything had to be in the same spot for me to find it—to know where it was.Necessity bears proficiency.My mind was used to creating images. Layouts. Design. Structure.Artwork.And that skill helped me now.Or at least, I liked to think it did.

Using my hand as a guide so I didn’t knock anything over, I found the box of crayons I’d set behind the tissues and pulled it to my lap, fumbling to return whichever color I’d chosen back to the box. Rob apologized earlier, saying that the only art supplies she could scrounge together on such short notice were ones that belonged to her nieces.

I didn’t mind, I assured her. I wasn’t going for a masterpiece—just memory. Of him.

Was I losing my mind?Dare was a stranger to me in the most basic sense of the word.Except he wasn’t.Theshape of his face, the feel of him—it was both foreign and familiar at the same time.

The lines of his face. The ridge of his brow. The curve of his lips. The memory of his skin under my fingertips. The scent of him still lingered in my nose. The rasp of his voice is still buried in my ears. The feel of him, hard and angled and damaged. And the taste?—

“Stop licking your lip.”

With the rest of my senses in overdrive, I swore I could taste him on my tongue. Rich and heady and masculine. But it was an invisible taste that made me hungry for more.For a man I couldn’t see. A man who’d protected me.

That was the funny thing about senses. Just because sight sometimes dominated the others didn’t mean that without it, the rest couldn’t paint a better picture. And trying to draw Dare was like creating a portrait of a flame. Sure, seeing the shape and color of the fire was part of it, but it was nothing compared to the picture painted by the other senses. From the sound of its power crackling and popping. To the scent of its consuming strength. And finally, to the pulsing, dangerous caress of its heat. Even if I could see Dare, I had a feeling the sight of him would only be a small part of the way he burned in my mind.

I traced my fingers over the paper, searching for the roughness where the wax crayon had marred it. I’d learned very quickly that everything I knew about drawing went out the window when I couldn’t rely on my eyes. My first several attempts ended up in crumbled balls to be thrown away. The trick was the crayon couldn’t leave the paper. Like peeling an orange by trying to remove the whole skin in a single, intact piece, his portrait was made of a single weaving, turning, curling, and cutting line.

The drawing was still probably terrible, but that didn’tmatter. I didn’t want it to be seen, I only wanted it to help me remember the handsome, scarred man who’d saved my life.

And the activity made the last several hours pass in what felt like minutes—something that would’ve instead felt like centuries if I’d instead spent it pacing along the walls of the safe house, wondering where Dare was. What he’d found out. If he’d found Brandon. If Brandon had…

Oh god.

I walked my fingers to the small alarm clock at the farthest end of the nightstand, hitting the first button on the right, and instantly, the clock’s drone voice announced,Eight thirty-seven.

It was late. Too late.I let out a small whimper and reached for the eye mask, tugging it off my head. The day had passed. Rob had brought me dinner. And now, I needed a new distraction because I obviously wasn’t getting any answers tonight.

I closed the notebook over my drawing and pushed it to the side of me. My feet worked their way to the floor, my hand on the nightstand as I stood. There was a method to make it safely to the bathroom.

The edge of the nightstand guided my first two steps. Then there were another two steps inan open abyss. From there, the doorframe of the bathroom was within arm’s reach, providing my next support to guide me into the room.

Every time I stepped onto the cool tile floor, I heard Rob’s voice in my mind as she’d described the room to me.

“On your right, yup, right there is the vanity. One sink. Okay, and when you get here, hold the corner and turn to your right. Now you’re straight in front of the toilet. If you don’t turn, another three or four steps this way…will put you right at the shower door.”My fingers pressed to the glass, streaking it with my fingerprints, until I reached the handle.“Don’t open the door all the way because it will bang into the side of the tub, which ison your left.”

I paused.A bath sounded good.Relaxing. It sounded like something I could use tonight.

I moved even slower to the left, suddenly in uncharted territory. Usually, my travels ended at the shower. It couldn’t be more than a?—

“Oww—” I swallowed down my cry as my leg banged into the edge of the tub. “Crap.” My exhale rushed from my chest, taking some of the instantaneous pain with it.I was getting better at getting injured.

Moving with a kind of painful slow motion, my hands mapped the oval shape of the tub and the anchor on the faucet on the right side, turning the handles one at a time until I determined which tap was hot and which was cold.

As the water filled, I undressed and tried to remember the last time I’d treated myself to a bath—Brandon always complained about how expensive it was to draw one in our house in Sacramento.Very expensive apparently when he was gambling our life away.

How could I not have seen it? Could I have been that?—

“Because you don’t pay attention, Athena. It’s like you don’t give a shit?—”

“I do care, Brandon!”

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