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“I don’t want to be one of your girls, Damion. No.” Her voice is steel. “Get the pizza.” And this time, when she shoves at me, it’s decisive.
I let her go.
And I hate that I let her go.
I scrub a palm over my jaw and press my hands to my hips, a hundred objections on my lips before I mutter, “I’ll get the stupid pizza one of us wants.”
“I can come up for the movie.”
“Not yet,” I say, turning to face her. “Not yet, Alana.” And this time, I’m the one who’s forceful.
She swallows hard and nods her agreement.
I leave her there then and rush up the stairs, open the automatic door, and allow her to be sealed back inside, where I should be with her. The doorbell rings again, and I hurry to answer, greeting the dude with the boxes and accepting the pizza without a word. I shut the door, and right when I do, thunder claps and the lights go out. Oh shit, I think, and set the box down on the foyer table. Alana’s downstairs, and I can’t get to her without the electronic panel.
In a mad race, I close the space between me and the basement door, and I hear her screaming, “Damion! Damion! Oh my God, Damion! It’s dark. It’s so dark.”
“Find the stairs,” I shout through the door. “Come up here to me. There’s a lantern by the door.”
“I can’t move! It’s too dark,” she screams.
“You can. You can do it. Walk toward my voice.”
“Oh my God, something touched me!”
It takes me a full five minutes to convince her nothing touched her and another ten to get her to the top of the stairs. “Find the lantern,” I instruct.
“I need out of here, Damion. I can’t take it.” Her voice is trembling.
“The power should be on any minute,” I promise. “Any minute. We need to get that lantern turned on.”
But she can’t find it, and the power doesn’t come back on, and she is not okay. An hour later, my father walks in the door, and his fury at the situation is only outmatched by Alana’s fear. He calls the fire department, and they rescue Alana long before the power comes on.
The minute the door opens and Alana spies me, she falls into my arms. I hold onto her, murmuring softly to her, while my father stares bullets at me. He hates her. That’s all I will hear later, but I don’t care. I’m not letting her go.
Chapter Fifteen
Damion
A horn screeching blasts me back to the present, and the backseat of the Walker-driven SUV with Blake sitting across from me. I inch to the side and glance between the seats, grimacing when I realize we’re now the ones trapped. We’re solidly behind a delivery truck, unable to make progress, and I feel as if I’m going to climb out of my own skin. The idea of Alana shoved in some dark place is driving me wild, destroying me. I should have said, “fuck the pizza” that night years ago and just kissed her, and then I would have been with her when the lights went out. I would have kissed her the whole damn time the lights were out, and she wouldn’t have been afraid.
I reach for the door, ready to walk the rest of the short distance between us and Alana’s mother’s apartment, when Savage abruptly cuts around the holdup. I sink back into the cushion, my mind beginning to play chess with my father, and we are too evenly matched for my liking. Minutes later, I’m no closer to taking his king, and he is too close to mine, and already now, we are pulling up to the building. Blake disconnects from a call I wasn’t even aware he’d taken—that’s how deep I’d sunk into the mental matchup with my father—and he does not look pleased.
Tension and dread beat at me with a one-two punch. “What is it?”
“Relax, man, at least for the moment. It’s not bad news. It’s just not good news. Our man, Joey, got into a vacant apartment above her mother’s, we were hoping was the ticket to finding her. Unfortunately, it was not.”
Of course not, I think. Back to the mental chess match. My father knew we’d focus on that location. It’s too obvious. “Now what?”
“We’re going door-to-door.”
I scowl at this idea, my tone brusque, bordering on impatient. “A plan that gets us nowhere. The kidnappers are not going to open the door, and they’ll lie and say she’s not there. And what if we’re wasting time and she’s not even in the building?”
If Blake notices, he doesn’t indicate any such thing, rolling with my punches with no more than a blink. “My team is scouring the exterior cameras within a mile in any direction of the building. We’ve found nothing. We would have found something if she had left the building. She has not left the building, Damion. I need you to trust me.”
The problem is, I do trust him. He’s one of the elites, in demand across the world, and it sure as fuck seems as if he’s still been outsmarted by my father.
I’m at my limit and done with this guessing game. I pull my cell from my pocket and punch in my father’s autodial, setting the phone to my ear. He answers on the first ring, probably waiting for and expecting my call. “Son,” he greets.
