Page 39 of The King (Masterpiece Duet 1)
My breath is trapped, held captive by the grief I feel for that small part.
I worried he didn’t exist anymore, but he did. He’s standing five feet away from me.
“Wait,” I tell him. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to—”
“I do,” he says softly, not turning to me again. That part is over.
Then he walks out the door, leaving me staring at the place where he stood.
The room is bathed in shadows, more dark than light. I step out of bed to the soft carpet, feeling it thick beneath my toes. I cross to the bathroom, blinking at the over-bright light. I face the wide mirror and lift my T-shirt by its hem.
I read what he’s written backwards. A proof.
A simple proof, from the trigonometry book. I shouldn’t even remember it. He definitely shouldn’t. Unless he looked up the book later. Unless he read it again and again. But why would he do that?
The answer filters into my mind like sunlight through dust motes, caught and held before shining again. Of course the numbers haven’t left me. There they are, as clear to me as the sun.
Damon must not have doubted that.
As I stare at the scrawled ink on my skin, my doubt fades away. It’s replaced by the confidence that let me challenge Damon Scott to a poker game. The confidence that’s let me survive the west side all these years.
And now Damon has gone to kill his own father. To become the monster he’s fought his whole life. Will he ever stop saving me? If he becomes a murderer, he might. If he kills Jonathan Scott, he’ll lose his last shred of humanity. I have to protect him the way he protected me.
Chapter Sixteen
Somehow I went for years without seeing Damon Scott.
He hovered low in my mind, the same quiet and insistent worry that I have knowing children in the city are hungry, knowing animals are in pain. He wasn’t my waking thought, my nighttime prayer. He didn’t take up every moment.
The next five days may as well be eternity. I stay locked up with Avery in Gabriel’s home, which may as well be a castle for how heavily guarded it is. It’s hard for me to eat, to sleep, because I know that Damon Scott is on the verge of something horrible.
Avery takes very good care of me, like he thought she would. She doesn’t question my worry or my lack of appetite, thinking I’m still recovering from the trauma.
My body heals more every day.
There’s something I want more than my strength, than my pale skin in its former smoothness. Only the guilty can understand this. I want redemption. There’s an emotional debt more pressing than money.
It was one thing to give Damon up when I was a child, alone in the trailer.
Another when I’m almost a grown woman.
I need to get out of this place, but I can’t do it alone, not with trained guards patrolling the perimeter. I watch them out the window when Avery thinks I’m mostly comatose, but that doesn’t reveal any answers. They seem to vary up their schedules, as if they know someone might try to enter.
As if they know someone might try to escape.
Avery doesn’t mean me any harm, that much I believe. But she’s as much a prisoner here as I am. Neither of us can leave. She’s the only one with any access to the outside world—a cell phone that she carries with her almost everywhere.
I know she texts her friend from college, because she tells me about some of them.
Other times her brow furrows, worry tinting her hazel eyes. She doesn’t tell me what she texts when she gets like this. I don’t know what she’s afraid of, but it’s something.
She looks up from her phone, her gaze beseeching.
“Come for a walk with me,” she says.
It’s something we’ve done before. Walks around the mansion. Through the garden. There’s even a maze made out of hedges. I swear, the things rich people think of to get rid of their money. It’s like they don’t know what to do with it all.
But I don’t know why she’s whispering. Who does she think will hear her?
The line of her throat moves as she swallows. “I want to find out where the voices are coming from,” she says, her voice shaky. “Will you help me?”
A shiver runs through me. What voices? I haven’t said much. Only Damon seems to thaw me enough to speak, but I know this is important. Important because I can help her, maybe. The way she’s been helping me.
Important because I can help Damon, who’s out with Gabriel in the bowels of the city, searching through rundown tenements and alleys for a modern-day dragon.
Smart people don’t always have perspective.
It had been a declaration. Does he love me? As a woman or as a child?
