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I snatch my phone from my purse and dial Damion, but it goes straight to voicemail. My chin sinks to my chest, his rejection driving home how mine must have felt. I chose to shove him away to protect him. He knows that. He said he knew moments before. I glance at Adam. “Where are you taking me?”
“To a safehouse.”
“Will he be there?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I’m the only one who can keep him out of jail, please help me get him there.”
“That’s the plan, but based on what I just saw in him, that may take a few hours.”
It’s not the answer I want, and I sink into the leather of the seat, accepting of the protection and more alone than I have ever been in my life. And I think Damion feels the same way. Worse, I did this to us.
Chapter Five
Alana
Savage drives us out of the city toward New Jersey, which means I’m quite possibly, once again, leaving Damion behind. Only this time, it’s his choice, not mine, though I doubt he’d see it that way. I’m the one who pushed him away. I’m the one who said no more.
Unless, of course, he’s traveled ahead of us, but I don’t know that I can count on that actually being true. I think of all that has happened these past few days and how out of my own mind I’ve been until Damion jolted me back to myself a few minutes ago. It’s funny how one can wallow in such pain that it owns us and everyone around us. There is no room for anything but the destruction it creates. We feel nothing else, certainly not compassion for those we love, because we have become the pain.
I once said Damion owns me.
But it’s the pain of losing my father that’s owned me these past days.
No, I amend firmly, in my mind. It’s not the pain that’s owned me. It’s something darker and harder. Somehow, pain has transformed into bitterness, anger, and a need for revenge, and those things have been all-consuming. Thanks to Damion, I know now that those cutting emotions are more dangerous than even the greed that West Senior openly owns—more destructive, too. That brutal combination drove me away from Damion under the façade of protecting him.
Maybe it was a façade. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself to that point.
I love Damion, and I do very much want to protect him, but the reality here is, if I’m being honest with myself, that I never believed he’d simply accept what had to happen to remedy his father’s ways. He’d never have allowed me to throw myself on the sword and risk myself to bring damaging attention to his father. And I didn’t want to wait to trap his father. I didn’t want to allow logic to own a place in my decisions, and Damion would have made me step back and think.
Or he would have promised me my revenge at his own jeopardy.
The drive stretches onward, which really doesn’t surprise me considering the destination is a safehouse, which means it must be someplace where we won’t easily be found, and West Senior’s power lies within the city. Or maybe it stretches far beyond, and it just serves my state of mind well to believe it’s somehow limited by distance.
Fifteen minutes stretch into what feels like an hour despite being truly only fifteen minutes. Impatience and my feeling of lacking control win, and I glance at Adam where he sits on the other side of the backseat. “How far until we’re there?”
“Depending on traffic, forty-five minutes to an hour and a half.”
In the New York/New Jersey connection region, that broad statement rings true rather than ridiculous, as it might elsewhere. “Do you have actual intel that I’m in danger?”
“Yes,” he replies.
My stomach knots, but there is no real fear inside me for my own safety where there might have been in the past. I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for my mother and for Damion. In that, I have been on the right side of this, even if I allowed the wrong path of action. “Can you tell me what?”
“That’s up to Damion,” he replies.
It’s an answer that strips even more of my control and removes me from the equation that is my own safety, but Adam ultimately works for Damion, and—well, I’ve not exactly proven I won’t take what he gives me and go public with it, either. I don’t push back, which, even in our short acquaintance, is probably as shocking to Adam as it is to me.
I’ll talk to Damion if I ever get the chance.
I nod and sink back into my cushions, lashes lowering, as I stare down at the engagement ring I didn’t forget to remove, as I told the crowd in the audience today. I simply don’t want to remove it. But my mind goes back to a time when wearing it was as painful as removing it. I’m there again, living that experience. I’d been destroyed by the fake finance routine and by the idea of wearing a ring he’d bought for me but never intended for me to wear until this charade of an engagement served his purpose.
As if he reads that in me, his hand closes around the ring and my hand. “This isn’t nothing.”
“It’s fake,” I reply, when in my mind I’ve told myself to just let it go, but apparently, I just don’t have that in me.
“It’s not fake. God, woman. I bought it for you.”
