Page 106 of Wicked Angel
“Well, he was the original architect. He loves you. How would he come to visit the son he loves inside the fortress?”
I didn’t know what to say. The fortress was nothing but a wall of stone that went on forever.
“You’ve told me many times about the great lengths he took to protect you,” Rory said. “Maybe he hasn’t been back in a long while, because that place is too painful for him, too. But you do believe that he loves you.”
Rory waited, like that was a question, so I forced out an answer.
“Yes.”
“Then wouldn’t he have built you a door, Johnny?”
ChapterNineteen
Johnny
We all have nightmares, sometimes.
Mine is in the backseat of a car.
There’s a dark street. The sound of the windshield wipers, beating back the weather, a slow, monotonous thud, as the rain on the glass turns to blood. There’s an old rock song playing on the car radio.
And a stranger in the front seat.
There’s cold, hard metal in my hand with a terrible weight to it. I know it to be the weight of death.
I’ve carried it with me for a long time now.
And in this nightmare, there’s a sound so loud it breaks apart everything else and leaves only silence in its wake.
Afterwards, I can’t speak for days.
Maybe in some ways, I still can’t.
ChapterTwenty
Angeline
The next time I saw Johnny, I was taking him to dinner.
Actually, he took me, in his car, which made it feel way more like a date, the two of us cruising through the city and over the Lions Gate Bridge into West Vancouver in his rumbling Hellcat. Lamar didn’t even come with us.
Along the drive, I’d been trying to focus on how not-a-date this was by peppering my client with niceness advice—like how to encourage others to talk about themselves and really listen to them, to try to get out of his own head and be genuinely present with people… But when we turned into our dinner hosts’ driveway, my stream of advice ground to a halt.
There was a car in the driveway that belonged to…
“Uh-oh.” It fell out of my mouth before I could think.
“What?” Johnny looked over at me just as my eyes found the man standing in the shadows beyond the car, smoking a cigarette.
“Flynn,” I breathed.
“Elle is here?”
“Elle and I, uh, grew up here. I had no idea she’d be here tonight, though. This is my parents’ house,” I confessed sheepishly. I still hadn’t told Johnny who our dinner hosts were, until now. I’d told him to be prepared for anything; however, I was the one who’d failed to prepare. For this.
I wasn’t prepared for anything but a nice dinner with my parents—the two nicest people I’d ever known. I’d come relaxed, or at least as relaxed as I could be with Johnny at my side, looking scrumptious in a pair of fitted jeans that accentuated his muscular thighs and a snug, collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top few buttons casually undone, his tattoos and golden skin and glorious toned physique all on display.
But of course, my sister was as welcome at dinner with our parents as I was. She might’ve warned me about Flynn, though.
