Page 16 of A Trap So Flawless (Titans and Tyrants #4)

Valentina

I suppose I have to give him some credit.

Darragh keeps his promise about the pill.

It’s eight in the morning and we’re now standing in line at a pharmacy within walking distance of the townhouse.

Even though he eventually did let me go shower, the place between my legs still feels sensitive and sticky.

I’m wearing my leggings without underwear, since I fell asleep without having the presence of mind to wash my panties yesterday.

And if there is one thing that could make standing in this harsh fluorescent lighting waiting for my turn in the line to ask for emergency contraception worse, it would be doing all this shit while wearing yesterday’s dirty thong.

I make a mental note to remind Darragh that I want to retrieve my bag from his car on the way back.

I would have asked him right then, but the pharmacist, a young, pretty woman with smooth brown skin and pink glasses, is calling me forward.

I step up, expecting to go alone, but Darragh comes right along with me.

“I need the morning after pill, please,” I tell her.

“Alright.” Her gaze slides to Darragh, and he has the usual effect on people when they see his hulking, tattooed frame and his hard-jawed face with its different coloured irises for the first time. Her eyes widen slightly, but she remains professional, returning her attention to me.

“Have you got a medical card? There’s no cost if you do.”

I’ve got an OHIP card, but it’s in Darragh’s car. And I don’t think it would make any difference, anyway, since it was issued by Ontario and not Ireland.

“I’m paying.” Darragh flashes a shiny black credit card at the pharmacist.

“I have cash I can give you,” I respond as the pharmacist turns away to fetch the pill. Darragh acts as if he doesn’t hear me.

“Have you ever taken this medication before?” she asks when she comes back to the counter.

“No.”

“This is a one-step pill. You should take it as soon as possible after having unprotected sex,” she explains. “There may be some side effects. Cramping and nausea. You might experience some mood changes with the hormonal shifts.”

Great. Sounds fucking peachy.

But then again, I’d experience all of that and more if I were pregnant. So maybe I should just shut up and count my meagre blessings.

“I understand,” I reply as she passes over the package. “Thank you.”

Darragh taps his card and murmurs, “You’re welcome.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I mutter as we walk away from the counter.

“I know.”

But despite my lack of gratitude towards him, Darragh still buys me a drink in the retail part of the drugstore so that I can take the pill right away.

I’m too nervous to wait even until getting back to the townhouse.

I open the package and pop the pill, swallowing it down with a big swig of some sort of way-too-sweet iced coffee in a bottle.

But it helps the pill go down, and the caffeine surely won’t hurt.

So I’ll take what I can get. As I nurse my sort of gross drink, I watch Darragh stalk through the store’s aisles.

He’s grabbing all kinds of stuff. He pays for it all and brings it back in a plastic bag.

“What’s all that?” I ask, giving up on the coffee drink and screwing on the lid. He opens the bag for my curious eyes. Inside, I glimpse a box of ginger tea, anti-nausea pills, digestive cookies, and painkillers.

It’s all for me.

I shove back on that. I don’t want to feel like he’s taking care of me.

I don’t want to be happy about anything he does.

“Got a tummy ache?” I ask, tossing my unfinished coffee in the trash.

“If I did,” he answers in a clipped tone, “I still wouldn’t be taking any of this shit. Maybe the tea. Although I generally think that ginger tastes like ass.”

Shit. I knew that about him. Deirdre told me that Darragh never takes any medications. Not even over the counter painkillers. Because his mother overdosed.

And then his father killed himself.

And Darragh came home to find them both.

After everything he’s done, I shouldn’t feel guilty. But I look at the bag filled with thoughtful things that he would never dream of using for himself, and I do. I feel tiny and mean and unfair.

“Darragh,” I begin, my hand reaching for him. But his long legs have already brought him to the door.

“Let’s go,” he says. “I have shit to do today.”

Darragh’s “shit to do” involves visiting his grandfather’s house.

Callum Gowan’s townhouse really is just down the street from the place he’s renting.

The sky is slate grey, but luckily the rain holds off until we get there.

This townhouse, though not dissimilar in layout from the place we’re staying, has a completely different vibe.

Darker paint and wood dominates the space. Not a floral motif to be seen.

What is to be seen, though?

Another man. I startle at the sight of him, panic pricking in every nerve. Because Darragh’s grandfather was recently murdered, and what if someone has now come for us? But Darragh isn’t fazed. He nods and grunts a greeting at the huge man with the ginger beard and red ponytail.

“Rowan. This is Valentina.”

Rowan gives Darragh a bit of an odd look. Probably because he already knows exactly who I am. But points to Darragh for being somewhat polite, I guess.

“Hi,” I say, giving him a thin smile.

He nods at me, but doesn’t answer. Man of few words, I guess.

After all the time I’ve spent with Elio and Curse, I can’t say I’m not used to that.

When Rowan does speak again, it’s only to Darragh, and I have a feeling he’s being extra cryptic due to the audience. The audience being me.

“I finally got in.”

In where? Rowan doesn’t say. But tension enters Darragh’s frame at once. A current of energy drawing his spine straighter, his jaw tighter.

“We have some work to do in the office,” Darragh tells me. He hands me the bag of stuff from the drugstore. “You can do whatever you want until then.”

“Whatever I want?” I ask, raising my brows at him.

“You know what I mean. No crazy shit. You can watch TV. Have a shower. Take a nap. No rooms are off limits.” He takes my chin in his hand, forcing my face up to his. “But do not try to leave this house without me. I will know. And I will come for you.”

“Please,” I mutter, smacking his hand away from my face. His touch leaves an echo of heat behind. “Where would I go? What would I even do? We still haven’t even gone to get my bag.”

I once again forgot to remind him after the drugstore, and by the time I remembered, we were already nearly here.

“I’ve got new clothes coming to the house for you today.” His eyes narrow to suspicious slits. “What are you so concerned about getting your bag back for?”

Because that ring is in it , I want to scream, and it’s probably worth fifty fucking grand!

“Your passport,” he suddenly growls, even though that thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, “isn’t going to do you any good now. I think I’ve already made that pretty clear.”

“Crystal,” I bite out. I squeeze the bag in my hands, feeling the thin plastic scrunch as I flounce angrily away.

As Rowan and Darragh close themselves off in Callum’s office, I find myself in the kitchen.

It’s simple, small, and clean, with charcoal-grey stone floors and butcher block countertops.

I still haven’t eaten, unless you count the sky-high sugar content in that awful coffee drink.

I’m not feeling any nauseating effects of the contraceptive yet, but I figure that making sure there’s something in my stomach before that happens is probably a good idea.

I open cupboards and the fridge. There isn’t much, but I do find a package of something called biscuits that look like what I would call cookies. I pause as I open the box, wondering if this is… well, weird. Standing in the kitchen of Darragh Gowan’s dead grandfather and casually eating his food.

But it’s got to be better than standing in the kitchen of Salvatore Di Mauro’s dead wife.

So I shrug and take a cookie – biscuit – from the box.

It’s not half-bad. Gingery and sweet. Which makes me snort, remembering Darragh’s deadpan comment earlier that he thinks ginger tastes like ass.

Unfortunately, that snort makes a tiny chunk of biscuit go straight to the back of my throat, and I immediately begin to cough violently, hacking away until tears gather in my eyes.

Somewhere in the house, a door slams open. The rapid-fire thunder of running footsteps gets louder and louder until Darragh is before me, his body blurred by my watery gaze.

“What is it?” he asks, quick and urgent. “What the fuck are you choking on?” Suddenly, his face is right in front of mine, his hands caging in the sides of my jaw. “If I have to perform the Heimlich on you again, Valentina, so help me God…”

“It’s fine,” I wheeze. “It’s just a crumb.”

He swears under his breath and shoves himself away from me. When he returns to my side, my coughing has mostly subsided. He’s holding a glass of water.

“Drink this.”

“Really?” I rasp with sweetly feigned surprise. “You want me to drink it? I never would have guessed.”

He’s not amused by my sarcasm.

“Shut the fuck up and drink it, pet.” He shoves the water against me and releases it. I scramble to grab hold of the glass before it spills all over me or worse – falls and shatters on the floor.

“Don’t choke on anything else,” he orders me as he leaves the kitchen. As if I did it on purpose. “It’s extremely fucking distracting for me when I think that you’re about to die.”

But he didn’t run here like he was distracted.

He ran here like he was worried.

I don’t reply as he disappears around a corner. I hear the office door close once more.

I drink the water, because despite my desire to rebel against his rather crass order to do so, it is a good idea. I eat a few more cookies, too, with no more coughing fits. There’s a small sitting room beside the kitchen, and I consider flopping down on one of the chairs or the couch in there.

But a part of me is itching to explore. And if I simply sit down in the quiet of this dead man’s house…

I’m going to think about other dead men.

My own husband with his gruesome hole for a face.

And my papà…

Though Papà might still be alive. He was in surgery when I left, but how that surgery ended? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t have an easy way to find out. Mamma must be a mess. Or she’s drinking and sleeping non-stop and letting Elio handle everything.

Even though she went along with everything Papà did, I still feel loneliness catch beneath my ribs when I think of her.

I do miss her. And guilt plucks at me with poisonous claws when I think of how she must have reacted to the news that I am missing.

I wonder if Elio has made it to Montréal. If he’s gotten Curse out.

If my feeble fingers were enough to keep Papà alive.

Yeah. This is why I need to do something instead of just sitting around and thinking.

I leave the box of biscuits and my glass of water in the kitchen as I wander.

There isn’t much else to see on the first floor, so I mount a dark and narrow set of stairs to the second.

There’s a small library up here that I’ll likely return to if Darragh takes a long time downstairs.

There’s also a bathroom with vintage-looking black and white tiles. And another room with the door closed.

I reach for the handle, then hesitate.

It doesn’t feel right to open this door. I can’t say why. It’s an instinct I don’t have a name for. The ghosting whisper of dread on the back of my neck. The sudden rise of goosebumps beneath my sleeves.

Darragh told me no rooms were off limits. Surely, if Callum had some torture chamber here, or a room full of dead bodies, Darragh would have warned me. Right?

I’m being stupid. I huff out a breath, grasp the handle in a suddenly sweaty hand, then open the door.

Well. That’s rather anticlimactic. My instincts must be total shit when it comes to this sort of thing.

Because there’s nothing on the other side of the door but a small bedroom with pale blue walls.

I step inside the space and slowly turn in a circle, taking in a single bed, a wooden dresser, a rickety desk in the corner with a few pens in a plastic cup, and a small framed poster of a quote that says, Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.

Above the desk is a shelf built into the wall and lined with plastic gold trophies. They’re the kind of trophies you might see in a kid’s room, if that kid participated in a sport.

A sport like boxing.

My stomach flips. The goosebumps are back.

Because suddenly, I know exactly where I am.

This was Darragh’s room.