Page 3 of Dancing With Darkness

Did she see Romero sleeping in my bed and get upset by it so she left?

Fuck, I rubbed my palms into my eyes as I sunk down onto the couch. I needed to get my head on straight so I could figure out how to find her.

“Are we just supposed to sit here and do nothing while we wait for her to show up?” Finn asked. He sounded and looked like a broken man.

I had nothing to say to him because I didn’t know what the fuck to say to him. I didn’t know what to say to any of them.

I felt like an absolute and total failure

This was a crushing blow to my soul and one I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive. When I’d lost my daughter after she’d been taken away from me by my repulsive sister it had been the absolute worst thing that happened to me.

Then my wife and my father had died.

I’d gotten my little girl back but not until she’d gone through hell and had grown up without me.

Now here I was with another crushing blow thinking I might have potentially lost another important person to me. My mind went down a dark, dangerous path, dancing and writhing in my own misery.

My future snatched away from me before I’d even had the chance to fully grab hold of it and embrace it. I feared I wouldn’t be coming back from this.

From the looks on the faces of every other person in this room I wasn’t the only one with this fear in the front of my mind.

We were all fucked without her, even Baxter.

Shit like this was partially why I had been so hesitant to do this again with another partner. Good things for me didn’t last and they always ended horribly.

Jesus, fuck, where could she be?

“Maybe she just ran out to grab breakfast for all of us,” Baxter suggested in a small voice.

I got him, but at the same time I wanted to shake him and tell him he wasn’t this stupid, after all he’d been through he should have been smarter than to hold onto foolish hope.

I didn’t do any of those things. I was already feeling like a giant fucking failure, I didn’t need to add being a bad dad on top of it.

“Have you checked in with that other coven she stayed with?” Romero asked quietly and my eyes snapped to his.

Fuck.

My mouth ran dry.

He meant Raven and his crew. As far as I knew she’d made friends with them and still kept in touch with them on the regular. Isobel didn’t make friends easily so I knew she held onto the ones she did make.

The problem was, I had no way to contact Raven or the other members of his coven. That had been Ariel’s doing and she’d know how to contact them. But I didn’t want to call her and ask. I didn’t want her involved in this.

I was worried she’d look at me and she’d see me as nothing more than a failure as well. I couldn’t hack it.

Someone banged on the front door and before anyone had the chance to get up and see who was on the other side of it it was pushed open.

It wasn’t Isobel who walked into my house.

No, my daughter and her husbands, plus her bodyguards, barreled their way inside.

I should have fucking known that Trenton and Simon would have gone home and ran their mouths. I hadn’t even thought to ask them to keep their mouths shut.

Ariel ran right over to me and dropped down onto the couch beside me. She wrapped her arms around me in a sideways hug but I didn’t have the heart to lift my arms so I could hug her back.

She didn’t seem to notice or care. “Is she here? Did she come home? Where is she?” She sounded slightly frantic but was trying to keep her emotions under control. And failing.

“She’s not here,” Romero answered her in a dead, empty voice.

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