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And then I stride up the stairs and into the basement.
“Daddy,” she whispers. “You came.”
“For you, baby girl, always.”
I turn with Dakota in my arms, my gun tucked into place. I hate this fucking space. It smells fresh and clean like it shouldn’t. But it’s a fucking basement, too similar to where they kept her.
She’s brilliant, my girl, even if she killed the sliver of a chance of an us.
Not that there could or should be an us in a perfect world.
I take her upstairs, and there are too many people in the boarded-up hotel. Her father’s there with Malone. And Alicia the cleaner and her small crew are here. A crew with boxes.
“Don’t tell me this is fucking just about the art,” I mutter.
There’s a small office, one we checked when we got here. I take her in there and set her down on a couch. She clings to me, but takes a shaky breath and finally lets me go.
“I’m pretty sure he’s put people in his collection,” Dakota says.
She looks at me, eyes haunted, an exhaustion dulling their brightness.
I want to… I don’t fucking know. Comfort her? Beat her ass for taking this on herself? Kiss her for being such a rock star about it?
It’s clear from what I walked into, from the state of her, that he was out to hurt her. That Trent did hurt her.
Fuck, he was seconds away from shooting Dakota when I got him.
I’m shaking. I look at my hand as I go to push it through my hair. Fucking shaking.
Because if I’d got it wrong, if I hadn’t tracked her, if we’d been a few seconds later, she might very well be dead.
“Orion?”
I slam the door and spin. “What? What are you going to say to me that makes this okay?”
The fury’s unleashed itself, and it lacerates me. I push out a breath.
“Orion.”
“One second the wrong way and you’d be dead.”
“He… he didn’t want to kill me.”
I close my eyes as the ground seems to shift. “You sound like Fina.”
“The woman you still love?” Her bitterness hurts me, too. “She didn’t obey you?”
“Josephina was a world-class war correspondent. She grew up rough. And she listened and made her own decisions. But she got killed in part because she went for the story.”
She gets up, legs wobbling, eyes way too fucking big. The cornflower blue is very bright now because there are tears shimmering and…
I could have lost her, too.
This time around, with Dakota and our insane connection that starts in sex and dives beyond into our souls fitting? If she died, I’m not sure if I’d survive.
She’s everything.
“I’m a dumb, naïve girl?”
