“I wouldn’t put it that way. I would have taken a finger, is all.”
He stared at me again in that way he did that said he was reading my every thought. “I found you,” he finally stated after a long silence.
“What?”
“Thirteen months after you disappeared, I tracked you down,” he clarified.
“You looked for me?” I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or call him a liar. He answered first with a single nod and a solemn expression.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I had to.”
“You had to,” I repeated dumbly.
“Do you realize how much your disappearance affected everyone?”
“You all seemed all too happy together.”
“Lake missed you. Dash needed you—”
“Yet you took them both from me.”
“They were never yours.”
“Nor were they yours,” I countered. Air blew from his nose reminding me of a dragon and breaking the temporary peace we had. The vein in his forehead became prominent, and I wondered just how buried below the surface was the old Keiran.
As soon as the thought formed, the vein disappeared and his shoulders slumped.
“You might be right,” he whispered.
“Don’t be stupid. Lake loves you.”
“I did a lot of fucked up shit to her. No amount of love can just erase it.”
“It got pretty intense at times, but I’m sure none of it matters to her now.”
“I raped her.”
“Excuse me?”
“Lake.”
My fist whipped out before I even knew what was happening and hit him hard in the eye. His head snapped. “You sack of shit.” I swung out again, but he caught my wrist in a tight grip.
“Enough,” he growled and looked around pointedly. The other patrons were watching with horrified expressions. I sat back against the booth and looked out the window, unable to stand the look of him. “I didn’t hurt her.”
“Allow me to not believe you. You raped her,” I cried.
“Talk louder, please.”
“You should be in prison.”
“I didn’t force myself on her, but I blackmailed her into letting me have her, and I didn’t give her much choice to say no.”
“She never told me.”
“She wanted to protect you.”
“From you.”
“From me,” he confirmed.
“I knew you were cruel, but I never thought you would go that far. You tortured her for years and for what cause?”
“I never thought I would go that far either. Some days I wish I had an excuse to hate her as much as I did just so I could live with the guilt.”
“Should I feel sorry for you?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything but listen.”
That shut me up. Begrudgingly, I nodded and folded my arms, appearing to have authority, but really, I was terrified of the truth.
“Twenty years from now when someone asks how we met and fell in love, what am I supposed to say? The truth? Our story is fucked up, and it’s all because of me.”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed. Surprisingly, he squeezed back. “But it’s still being written. You can’t change your past. The only thing you can do now is to learn from it. Make her happy and more importantly, always make her feel safe. She needs it.”
We both became lost in mutual silence as we retreated into our thoughts.
“You realize we almost died together,” he pointed out after some time.
“Yeah, so?”
“I think that makes us friends now.”
“We’ll see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
DASH
TWO HOURS WAS all it took for me to become fully rabid. After Simon had confirmed that Willow, my Willow, was his daughter and that she was engaged to some prick, I rushed home with her father in tow only to find her gone.
I worried and pulled at my hair while calling around in search of her until I found that my car keys were also missing, which meant she left willingly.