Page 17 of Cruel Dominion

I followed her through the crowd and out a set of French doors into the cool evening garden below. A few people had abandoned their empty glasses out here, but it was too cold for anyone to linger. Anna and I were finally alone.

She stood facing away from me. Her dress had a low dip in the back, and her spine and shoulder blades showed through her skin. It was normal to lose some roundness with age, but she looked weak. Almost frail. I had watched my mother battle cancer. I knew healthy weight loss didn’t look like that.

How hadn’t I noticed back inside?

At the curve in her back was a partially hidden yellow-brown mark. A bruise. My vision went red as rage crashed over me. My muscles tightened, ready to fight whoever had dared to fucking touch her.

Barely thinking, I grabbed her arm, probably too tightly. She spun around, pulling it out of my grasp.

“Carter, what the hell are you?—”

“What happened to your back?” I demanded.

“My what?” she asked, confused.

“Your back. Who did that to you?”

“My… oh.” Her confusion cleared.

“Was it your father?”

I wouldn’t put it above him. Hudson Vaughn was a dirty, dangerous man. It took one to know one. Both of our sperm donors were hell bent on ruining our lives when we were younger. I got away from mine but Hudson was still in Anna’s life.

“My what? What are you talking about?” she said. I could see right through her; I knew a healing bruise when I saw one. I also knew when she was lying to me.

And was that more bruising under the layers of makeup on her face? Her neck?

It was hard to tell, but the more I looked the more I thought I was right.

My throat went dry as hell and my blood heated.

“You know what I’m talking about,” I said through gritted teeth. “Someone hurt you.”

Her face went totally blank. “It’s none of your business.”

I stepped in closer, backing her into a vine covered trellis but she only jutted her chin out defiantly, staring with the fire of a thousand suns into my eyes. Refusing to back down.

“Oh? Not my business?”

I jerked her chin up and to the left, trying to get a better look at the bruise Hudson’s makeup artists couldn’t quite erase on her cheekbone.

She pulled away from my touch and shoved me hard in the chest, her own heaving. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” she snapped. “Which is convenient for you, since you already got everything you wanted from me a long time ago.”

“Anna.”

She pushed past me.

“Anna.”

She whirled, rage in her green eyes. Rage and pain. “Fuck you, Carter Cole. You’re not allowed to care. Not after…”

Her lips pressed tight against a quiver, face pinching trying to hold all that emotion in. All of the evidence of the truth—that she still felt something for me. That maybe, she never stopped.

It was all the proof I needed.

My stomach soured and the beating thing in my chest remembered how to ache as she tore her eyes away from me, shook her head, and stormed out of the garden and back inside.

This time, I didn’t bother stopping her.

---