Page 21

Riley

R omeo’s whining wakes me.

I move slowly, as I always do since jarring movements can sometimes alert someone that you’re awake when it’s in your best interest for them to think you’re still asleep.

I don’t waste time putting on a shirt as I withdraw the firearm from beneath my pillow then slowly creep to the cracked door and peer out.

The hall is dark, but there’s a sliver of light coming from beneath the door to Jules’s grandfather’s study. A shadow moves, and my heart rate increases. Jules’s bedroom door is closed, no light peeking out from beneath it.

Did the killer come back?

Is it Odie?

“ Fuss , Romeo,” I order. Heel. He falls into step beside me, and we move near silently down the hall.

I pause just outside the closed door. I can hear someone moving around, but there’s no other sound. Weapon at the ready, I grip the door handle and turn, then shove the door open and rush inside with my weapon.

But the moment I see who’s inside, I lower it.

Jules is on the floor, a ferocity in her tear-filled gaze I’ve never seen. “You should go back to bed,” she says then sniffles and returns to scrubbing the bloodstained carpet just in front of the closet she’d hid in.

“Jules, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she snaps. “It’s dirty, and I’m cleaning it.” She’s scrubbing with such anger that I’m sure she’s going to tear her stitches—if she hasn’t already.

I set my gun down on the desk and slowly cross toward her, then I kneel beside her. “Jules.” I keep my tone soft and level, comforting, because the pain she’s tried so hard to hide is a noose around her throat, strangling the light right out of her.

“No. You said it yourself. It’s no longer a crime scene. Which means I can clean it. He would have wanted it cleaned.”

I reach down and cover her hand with mine. It’s shaking—they both are. And even though I imagine it’s the last thing she wants to do, she drops the scrub brush on the carpet and leans into my arms as I wrap them around her.

Her sobs come hard and fast, shoulders shaking as she falls apart on the bloodstained floor of her grandfather’s study.

“I feel so useless,” she cries. “My whole life has been one poor mistake after the other. I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t my fault too. What if I’m the reason he’s dead? What if I did miss something in that contract and?—”

There’s so much guilt in her tone, so much weighing on her shoulders. “You’re not the reason he’s dead. The guy who pulled the trigger is.”

“No. I’ve messed up so many times. Odie’s always told me my past will come back to haunt me. What if this is it? What if someone I wronged came to take the only thing I had left?”

She clings to me, and I hold on, pulling her into my lap and cradling her as she grieves for what is probably the first time.

“I have to at least clean up. Things have to be made right.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” I tell her. “Not a single thing but heal.”

“How can I heal? He’s the only reason I’m alive. Do you know that? He—” She trails off.

“Tell me, Jules. What did he do?”

“The missing years, as you call them,” she chokes out. “I wanted to die when I finally got back. I tried and he—” She chokes on the words, her entire body trembling. “He found me and—he wouldn’t let me die.”

Suicide. I hold onto her harder, hoping that my embrace will ease the pain of her past. She felt so low, so broken that she thought not existing at all was the better option. Which only makes me angrier when I think of all the horrible things Odie has likely said to her over the years.

“He loved you.”

“I don’t know why. I didn’t deserve it. Odie was right. I didn’t earn his love.”

“Love isn’t earned,” I tell her. “It’s a gift.”

“It’s one I didn’t deserve. He’s dead now. And I can’t shake this feeling that it’s my fault.”

“Then tell me why you feel that way, and I’ll help you find the truth.”

She falls silent for a moment, just leaning against my bare chest. It feels so good to hold her. To feel like I might stand a chance at chasing away some of the monsters hiding within her.

The demons that still cling to her soul.

And in this moment, I vow to destroy every single one of them even if it’s the last thing I do.

“Come on, let’s get you some tea, and we’ll talk.”

Nodding, she pulls away from me. And as she does, she tries to shield her face, looking anywhere but at me. So, I cup her face with my hands and force her to look at me.

“Don’t hide, Jules. Not from me.”

“I don’t know any other way. Whenever I open up, about anything, people run.”

I brush a tear away with my thumb. “Then let me show you that I’m not going anywhere.”

Thirty minutes later, I’ve put a shirt on and have finished making tea. I also put in a call to Tucker that will hopefully ease some of her pain.

I put some honey into both mugs then carry them into the living room where Jules is sitting on a plush leather couch, staring at an empty fireplace.

“Here.”

“Thanks.” She looks at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“You’re welcome.”

Romeo is lying on the floor beside her where he’s been since we came downstairs. It warms my heart to see that he wants to soothe her pain too.

“I’m sorry for that. For falling apart.”

“Don’t ever apologize to me. Not for that.”

“I was trying to sleep, and that stain just kept popping into my mind. My grandfather loved organization. He wanted everything neat and in its place. He would be appalled at the state of this house.”

“He would understand,” I tell her.

“I’ve messed up a lot in my life,” she says. “For a while, it was just one bad choice after another. At some point, I forgot who I was before—well—everything.”

“Tell me.”

She turns to me. “It’s not a pretty story, Riley. And it’s going to change how you see me.”

“No, it won’t.” I’m sure she believes that I’m just saying it to get her to talk, but it’s the absolute truth. At this point, there’s not a single thing I could see or hear that would make me think this woman is anything but the epitome of strength.

“Even after my dad died, I tried to see the joy in life just like he taught me. I fought for a long time to make Odie happy. To help him through the pain of losing his only remaining parent too. He never quite got over it though. Blamed me pretty hard for the entire thing, actually.” She takes a drink of her tea.

“He skipped my sixteenth birthday party, so it was just me, my grandfather—who wasn’t feeling well—and a man named Glen Dodger. ”

“Glen Dodger?”

“He was a friend of my grandfather’s. They would golf together. He was a doctor who traveled all over the world.” Her tone is cold. Detached.

Unease climbs up my spine. “What did he do to you?”

She shifts her gaze back to the empty fireplace.

“It started out small, a gift here and there. A compliment. He told me that I was mature for my age. That he couldn’t believe I was only sixteen.

He’s who gave me my first glass of wine.

My sixteenth birthday party was when everything changed.

I wanted to go to the mall and get these earrings I’d seen, but like I said, my grandfather was sick, and Odie was at work. Glen offered to drive me.”

Disgust churns in my stomach, and bile sears the inside of my throat as anger takes over every other rational part of my brain. I set my mug aside. She barely notices, clearly lost in her past.

“By the time I knew what was happening, I was too afraid to say no. And afterward, he promised to take me to see the world. I told him I wanted to go home, I just wanted to shower. So badly.” Tears slip from her eyes.

“He agreed and offered me a bottle of water. It was the last thing I remembered before waking up on the other side of the world a day later.”

“He kidnapped you,” I snarl. “What did your grandfather do?”

“He called Glen, looking for me, and Glen claimed that he’d brought me back home.

I know now that he’d snuck up to my room and left a note claiming I was running away.

That I couldn’t live in that house anymore.

” A tear slips down her cheek. “He’d thought through every step of the plan.

Even to the point of giving me money instead of a present because he’d overheard me telling my grandfather I wanted to go to the mall.

” She swallows hard. “I’d begged him to take me home, but he said I’d seduced him and that I was lucky he was so forgiving.

That he would give me a good life and all I had to do was obey. ”

“Jules.” My chest aches even as a fresh wave of anger washes down on me.

“For two years after that, he kept me out of the country. He’d convinced his coworkers over there that I was mentally ill and suffered from delusions. I was kept drunk or drugged for most of that time.”

I have to do something , and since Glen Dodger isn’t here for me to kill with my bare hands, I get up and begin to pace.

“It was a ten-year-old boy named Micah who freed me. He took me out of the room I was being kept in and brought me to his dad, who smuggled me back to the States. They brought me home.”

“Did you tell your grandfather when you got back?” Somehow, I fear I already know the answer.

She shakes her head, tears slipping down her face. “I told Odie, and he told me that I needed to deal with the consequences of my actions. That no one would believe me and it was better if I kept my mouth shut.”

The words that come to mind are nothing a Christian man should say, so I bite my tongue. But I want so desperately to bury both Glen and Odie. Six feet under where they can never hurt her again.

“So I did. And I turned to alcohol to numb the nightmares and dull the pain during the day. There were times I felt so guilty that I almost went back to Glen. He even came here one day, about a month after I escaped.”

“He did what? ” I growl the words, but if Jules notices, she’s unaffected by the murderous rage lacing my tone.