Page 60 of Scars Run Deep

He shoved his hand inside one of the many pockets of his tactical vest.

He was pulling out his phone in the next moment. He scrolled for a bit, then spun the screen and showed me a photo.

Huh.

It had been taken at Fusion a few nights ago. It depicted Jonah dragging a very disheveled Aurora by her hair, red-raw marks all over her throat, a couple of hickeys too, cum slicking her cheek.

Well, that photographic evidence was certainly something.

“A spy in our midst took that. We set him up.”

“And yet it doesn’t change the fact that the photo itself is real. This still happened to my daughter.”

I recited what I’d told the boys and Aurora before the mission, “The façade is over. I declared war. There’s no more pretense. There’s just the four of us. We’re in this together. We protect each other. That’s where the loyalty begins and ends.”

Lance was noticeably careful not to look at the photo as he stowed his phone away. “What?”

“Those were the words I spoke to Aurora, Jonah, and Killian, shortly after the night that photo was taken. That’s the reality of how things are between us.”

He stared at me, seeming to like that even less.

In the next moment, he was right there in my space, and grasping my jaw in a white-knuckle grip.

His eyes blazed into mine like a raging fucking inferno. “You can’t have my daughter.”

“Again, that’s her decision,” I forced out against his constricting hold.

“She’s not a challenge to be won.”

“That’s not what it’s about.”

He scoffed.

“That’s Carson, not me. We’re not the same. And if your concerns for your daughter weren’t leading the way right now, you’d be able to admit that you already know that. I saw it, I felt it from you in that slaughterhouse.”

“You saw and felt what I allowed you to.”

Bullshit. “She’s not weak. She knows her own mind. She’s sharp, resourceful and capable in ways you can’t even imagine, because you’ve been away through the key years of that development. You think even if you somehow, against all rhyme and reason, manage to hide her away from all of this, that she’ll retreat to the girl she was before she touched this world and all the darkness and fuckery associated with it? She is it. She wants it. She’s as much a part of it as it is of her. She’s roaring fucking flames and no one can extinguish that hellfire coursing through her veins. Not you. Not my father. No one. She’s not a victim, she’s the one who’ll save them, safeguard them. Hell, she wants to do what you were… private security. She’s hellbent on it. That’s why she’s studying what she is. Not to become some corporate stooge. It’s much more than that for her. And you should be proud, because you obviously inspired it in her.”

I was vaguely aware of his grip loosening, and then leaving me entirely at some point.

But I was too caught up in what I was saying, thoughts of her streaming forth virtually unfiltered, that I paid it little mind, as I went on with a smile in my voice, “She can meet me on my level. The only one who can. She’s exceptional.”

I blinked out of my thoughts to find him staring at me, looking as close as he could possibly get to shocked.

Stunned, maybe.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re in love with her.”

Before I could get a word out—or even process the accusation—he started shaking his head vehemently. “Absolutely not. This can’t happen. And it’s all the more reason for me to pull her out. Your world is dark, twisted, and depraved. There’s no end to the danger, the manipulation and intense level of calculation required just to keep your head above water. There’s no living, only survival. No, she won’t end up like that, like the three of you.”

“Things will alter with the fall of the Infidels.”

“Not good enough,” he muttered to himself as he started pacing back and forth.

“My sentiment toward her is all the more reason for you not to pull her out.”

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