Page 71 of A Forbidden Arrangement
I watch her for any sign that she’s scared, ready to get up and walk away. The tension eases and turns to amusement, my chest lightening when the tips of her ears turn pink.
Several seconds pass, and when it doesn’t look like she’s going to be the one to start talking, I give her a little nudge. “How about we start from the beginning? Tell me why you ran away.”
“I… When I left the hotel that morning…” she starts to say.
“We’re going to circle back to that later.” I’m still pissed that I woke up alone, but if I get into that, we’ll never talk about anything else. “After you left?”
She nods, fingers tugging at the fabric around her knees. “I didn’t want to walk out the lobby door, so I took the side exit into the alleyway.”
This time, I can’t suppress my growl. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?” I don’t continue with the fact that she should have waited for me.
“Well, I do now.” There’s a little frustration in her voice, and I’m glad to see some of her fight come back.
“So you enter the alley?” I prompt her to continue.
“There were four men, one of them on the ground. And by the time I realized what was happening, the door had already clicked shut behind me.” She takes in another deep breath, as if struggling to get this next part out. “The guy on the ground was b…begging.”
The way her words break apart has me nearly closing the gap between us and taking her in my arms. I force myself to stay seated and wait for her to go on.
Tears gather on her lashes, and when she looks at me, it’s like she’s begging me to understand. “I couldn’t help him. He was reaching for me, and I didn’t help him. They shot him.” The last word cracks apart on a sob.
The sound guts me. I move before I think, crossing the space and pulling her into my arms. She folds against me, her nails grazing my skin, her face buried in my neck. I keep one hand at the small of her back, tracing slow, steady lines up and down her spine. My voice drops to a whisper against her hair. “There was nothing you could do. You couldn’t save him. None of it was your fault.”
Putting the pieces together, the timeline fits perfectly. She’d witnessed Elliot kill Calder. I want to go back in time and shredeach one of them apart again for making her cry, for letting her believe for a second that any of this was her fault.
“Pretty girl, you did the right thing. They would have killed you if you tried to help.”
She melts into me further, some of the tension loosening as if she’s been waiting all this time to hear those words. Her voice hitches when she says, “I took a picture. I didn’t know what else to do to help him, but I didn’t want them to just get away with it.”
Half of me is so proud of her for being brave, and the other is pissed that she put herself in that kind of danger. Elliot would have known that my brothers and I would come after him if we got hold of that image. He’d have done anything to erase the proof.
“They chased you?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“I had nowhere to go, so I got on the next bus out of there.”
There’s a sharp ache in my chest, picturing her out there alone. I should have held on to her tighter. Made it clear that I wasn’t going to let her go just after one night. I wanted to give her a few hours to let her settle into the idea, knowing everything she’d just gone through. If I’d had any inkling of what was about to happen, I’d have tied her to the bed.
“You must have been terrified,” I murmur reassuringly. Dahlia has been carrying all of this weight on her own this entire time.
I tighten my grip around her, pulling her closer. I failed at protecting her, but never again.
She sniffs, her voice steadier now. “That’s not even half of it. They were right outside the bus when we pulled away, and the whole time after, I kept waiting for them to catch me. Elliot sounded so sure he’d find me. I didn’t know how connected he was, so I took out my SIM card and stayed on that bus until I was sure we were miles apart.”
“You did a good job, Dahlia. They would have found you through that SIM.”
It’s part of why it took me so long to track her down. I run my fingers along her back, slow and steady.
“It didn’t matter. He found me.” Her voice trembles, and her nails dig into my back.
Guilt burns through me. I should have been the one to find her first. I should have kept her safe. I close my eyes and listen to her breathing, each sound proof she’s still here. I was too close to losing her.
Everything after finding her in that alley is a blur. The blood, the sirens, the way her body shook in my arms. I can’t tell if the trembling now is hers or mine. I force myself to remember what she saw that night, what could have made her look at me like I was the monster.
“You saw me there.”
She nods against my neck, her voice small. “Why…why were you there?”
“I looked for you the entire time you were gone.” My voice comes out rough, sharper than I mean it to. I rake a hand through my hair, the muscle in my jaw tight. “If you’d used your credit card, checked into a hotel, even walked through a place with security cameras, I would’ve known. Anything would have led me to you.” I exhale hard, fighting the heat rising in my chest. “But no matter how much money I threw at it, no matter how many people I sent, you were gone.” My throat works around the words that follow. “Fuck…I should never have believed that bastard.”
