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“Of course. I’ll never leave you, Beauty.”
CALLISTA
My own scream rending the night air jolts me from a fitful sleep, and I jerk upright in bed, heart stuttering, unable to suck in any air. “Weston?”
I manage to cry out his name and search the dark for him, reaching out across the bed to find the cold mattress beside me. Panic seizes my chest, tightening around it.
He said he wouldn’t leave.
He said—
“I’m right here, Beauty.”
His deep, gravelly voice floats to me from across the room, and I whip my head in that direction to find him sitting in the same chair he was that first night he brought me here.
Only this time, instead of a glass, he has the whole bottle in his hand.
“You said you wouldn’t leave me…”
He leans forward slightly into the light filtering out from the cracked bathroom door and gives me a hard smile. “I was only gone a minute, love. I’ve been here the rest of the time. I needed something to help me calm down; otherwise…”
A shudder rolls through his massive frame, every muscle in his body flexing and bunching as if he can’t control them.
It’s the first true sign I’ve seen of weakness in the man since I set foot on his mountain.
My heart starts to return to its normal rhythm the longer I sit, eyes locked with his gray ones. “You didn’t sleep?”
He shakes his head and runs a hand back through his silver hair. “I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to get in the bed and risk hurting you.”
Tears prick my eyes.
How can a man be so violent, so deadly, yet so gentle and caring?
A juxtaposition that has always made my head spin, and his lack of faith in himself slices like his axe head at my aching heart. “You’d never hurt me.”
He takes a long sip from the bottle. “Maybe not intentionally, Beauty, but I promise you, in the end, I will.”
The absolute confidence in his statement makes my tears finally fall.
This man rescued me. He saved me—over and over again—yet all he can see is some scenario in his head that ends with me in misery.
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true, Beauty.” A sigh falls from his lips before he takes another long pull and hisses at the burn of the alcohol. “Everything that happened to you has been my fault.”
I shake my head and swipe at the tears, then pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them, wincing at the ache in my hip that acts as a very real reminder of the ordeal I would rather forget. “That’s not true. You weren’t even there.”
“But it was because of me. All of it. The things that have happened to you, none of them have been because of your own free choices.”
“My father—”
“No.” He shakes his head and takes a sip from the bottle. “Not your father’s decisions. Mine.”
Whether it’s the lingering effects of the drugs that were given to me, smashing my head on those steps, or the fact that I just awoke, his words just won’t make sense.
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“We don’t need to get into it now, Callista. It’ll wait ‘til morning, until you’ve rested.”
