Page 76 of The Villain

I stilled with my hand on the doorknob. “I’m not afraid of what will happen—I know what will happen, and I’m trying to spare her any more pain.”

The past should be left in the past, and I was her past.

I turned, stalking through the door. As I closed it, I noticed a dark sedan parked across the street start its engine and slowly pull away.Goddammit, Ty.Now, instead of seeing nosy neighbors, I was seeing danger where there was none.

“Is it true?” Rob stood in the hallway, blocking my path.

My chin lowered. “Ivans is dead.”

I caught the way she shuddered, relief and rage rippling through her small form. She was happy, but she wished it had been her to face him—to end him.

“Are you okay?”

“Ty thinks there was a third shooter.” She changed topics, and her tone had me thinking she had her own ideas of who the third shooter could be.

“Ty can think what he wants,” I said and approached. “Even if there was, Ivans was the crux—the keystone of this whole damn thing. Finding him. Framing him. Whatever the hell the plan was, it ended with his life. Along with the danger to Athena’s.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you going to tell her?”

I nodded. “And then I’m going to take her home.” I walked around her, hoping to make that the end of our conversation.

“Dare…”

I let out a breath and called the elevator, preparing myself for one more criticism—one more clear critique of my innumerable failures.

“She’s starting to see shadows.”

My head snapped to the side, the truth written all over her face:I was on borrowed time.

If I didn’t get Athena out of my life now, I’d have to tell her that one more man she’d trusted was a liar.

Chapter Fifteen

Athena

“You’re back.”

His scent. His steps. They were all familiar at first. But now, there was a shadow to him. A kind of phantom darkness that took over the foggy screen of my sight.

I couldn’t believe it when I woke up earlier and saw…light. It was fuzzy. Like cotton or wool pulled over the sun, but the total darkness was gone, replaced by a cloudy reality of light and shadow.

And Dare’s shadow was big—big and suddenly still as my head followed his movements.

“You can see.”

“Shadows.” But it was something.Hope. And then he was in front of me, the whole of him still invading the rest of my senses like they’d never get enough. “Dare…”

His hand pressed to my cheek, holding it like I was something fragile—a flower to be crushed if he wasn’t careful. And there was something about his touch that was familiar in a wayit hadn’t been before. Something that went deeper than this moment, all the way down to the depths of a memory.But of what?

I was going crazy. Foolishly burying the seeds of his tenderness and hoping he’d let them grow into something more.

“We just got back from Ivans’s house.”Straight to business.

The first thing Rob told me this morning when she’d come was that Dare and Ty had gone to the address on the invoice. I wanted whatever answers they’d uncovered, but for some reason, not as much as I wanted answers about last night.

Had he left because of what he told me? Because he thought I would see him differently now, knowing what kind of betrayal he suffered? Or was it me that kept him away—was it what happened afterward that brought his barbed-wire walls back up?

Whatever the answer, it would have to wait until he said what he came here to say—something I should be more concerned about considering it was my life in jeopardy.

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