She was blond again. Her sleek, chin length hair was tucked behind one ear. From Damian’s angle, it accentuated her full, pink lips and made him yearn for things he’d lost the rights to when he’d pulled the trigger.
Skye was wedged between her father and Nick Turner, the guy she’d had dinner with on the night Damian had abducted her. Damian hated him for sitting so close to her, for being able to sit so close to her, his shoulder touching hers. He hated him more for that one single privilege than all the charges Nick had brought against him, because Nick was also the lawyer who was prosecuting Damian.
Although Damian had dual citizenship—Mexican and American—he was tried in San Diego because he had kidnapped Skye on U.S. soil. Except it never got to a trial. Damian pled guilty. He had maimed Victor, kidnapped Skye, held her captive, cut off her finger and finally, shot her. Damian’s lawyer and Nick worked out a plea bargain, with Nick pushing for the harshest sentence.
Nick despised Damian for taking away the girl he had come to adore, and for the things he believed he had done to her. Although Skye refused to see Nick outside of legal proceedings, Nick was convinced it was because of the trauma she had suffered, and that with time, she would give him another chance. He did not believe her when she told him she had fallen in love with Damian. So what if Damian was this Esteban kid she had once known? Skye was not in her right mind and it was up to him and Warren to put Damian behind bars forever. They trumped the kidnapping charge to aggravated kidnapping, given that Damian had caused Skye bodily harm. They wanted to tack on aggravated rape, but Skye insisted that the sex had been consensual, and refused to let them turn it into something ugly.
Of course, Damian knew none of this as he watched Skye between the two men. He saw them as a unit, a trio of joined forces.
Whatever you choose, Damian, know that I will always, always love you, she had said to him.
He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that so much, but how could he, knowing that she was withholding the one thing that would have earned him some lenience? The fact that he had let her go. He had set her free, dropped her off and she had come back to him. That was something only the two of them knew. Yes, he had made the wrong choice. He had given in to the darkness when he should have stood by her, but he needed to know that she still cared. He would happily spend the rest of his life locked up in a cage for all the things he had done, but he needed that one fleeting moment of light, so he could go knowing that it had been real for her.
As Damian stood before the judge, ready to receive his sentence, his eyes fell on Skye. One look, one glance from those haunting gray eyes, and he’d be redeemed.
Say something, I’m giving up on you.
But she kept her head bowed. She had not looked at him the entire time, and she did not look at him then. Skye knew that if she did, if she looked up from her lap, she wouldn’t be able to keep anything from him, and she had held it together for too long to let everything fall apart now. The sooner this case got wrapped up, the better for them all.
She had told her father and Nick that Damian had let her go, that she was the one who had gone back, but they were convinced she had suffered some kind of psychological breakdown. They were prepared to call in a psychiatrist to discredit anything favorable she had to say about Damian, and testify that she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“I can’t understand why you’re defending him, Skye.” Her father had paced the hospital room where she was recovering from the bullet wound. “Look at what he’s done to you. He shot you, Skye. He was going to shoot me, but he ended up shooting you. Is this the kind of guy you want walking free? Someone who is so blinded by revenge that he can’t see straight?”