Page 4 of Cruel Dominion

“Can I come in?” I asked after an uncomfortable silence.

“Why did I have to hear from my security that you were coming home?” he asked, scanning me head to toe and seeming displeased with what he saw. “What happened to your neck?”

“Dad,” I managed to force out the word. “I’ve been traveling since last night. I’m exhausted and I need a shower. Can we do this later?”

His chest rose and fell with a short, harsh breath. He was angrier than he was letting on.

“You’re lucky you’re my daughter,” he said, giving a wave of his hand to tell me I could go. I picked my duffel up but he took one look at it and sneered. “Fredrick, dispose of that.”

The man from the door collected it from me. I held onto the handle a second longer, but let it go, knowing it wasn’t worth the fight.

“That’s all I have,” I tried. A weak attempt at an argument.

My father looked down his nose at me. “It most definitely is not. I’ve had your closet restocked with an updated wardrobe, and you’ll find everything a lady might need in your bathroom.”

…updated wardrobe?

So, this was it. I was to be his doll. To smile when looked upon. To speak when spoken to. To look the part of the governor’s daughter and act accordingly.

I knew what I was agreeing to when I decided to come home, but it still made my skin itch to be proved correct.

“You look terrible, go get cleaned up,” he said, dismissing me as if it’d been days instead of years since he’d last laid eyes on me.

Burying the jab of pain down deep where I didn’t have to feel it, I moved across the entryway. He didn’t have to tell me twice.

I went straight to my room, hoping to see Rosie along the way, but she didn’t show herself.

Inside, everything was exactly the same. The blue, white, and yellow furnishings that were my mother’s idea. The queen bed with the gold-brown teddy bear leaned against the throw pillows. In the bathroom, a bottle of what used to be my favorite Dior body wash when I was a teenager rested at the edge of the soaker tub. Rosie did this. My father wouldn’t know that I used to like to smell like ylang-ylang and vanilla. I plugged my phone in to charge and went straight to the bathroom to shower.

I scrubbed the long bus ride away, trying and failing to get the previous night out of my head.

Just like I thought he would, Josh got home in the morning after storming off last night. I knew because he called me nonstop. I blocked his number before he drained my battery.

Still not feeling quite clean enough but too tired to care, I crawled into bed, still coherent enough to hate how it felt safe.

It was a cage, but it was also home. Complete with a full security detail and cameras covering most of the property. Josh couldn’t find me here. He wouldn’t.

He was dating Annie Taylor. Not Anna Vaughn.

I reached over the nightstand for my phone. Laying my head back on the pillow, I typed another name into the search bar. Every single one of the results on the first page was highlighted purple. I had clicked them all a lot more times than I wanted to admit.

Carter Cole. I couldn’t think of home without thinking of him.

He wasn’t active on social media, unfortunately for me, but then neither was I. In fact, you couldn’t find so much as a recent photograph of me anywhere on the internet from the last six years. I made sure of it.

I opened the first link, his company’s website. He was a CEO of some big ass company now. Not bad for a guy who used to work two jobs when we were in high school. I sounded spiteful, and I was, but I was happy for him too. As happy as I could be for the boy who started my epic run of terrible luck with men.

The others I could forget. Their faces all faded with time and distance. But not his.

He was the one I could never forget. No matter how far I ran. No matter who shared my bed. When I shut my eyes at night, his was the face that infected my dreams.

Carter never struck me, never made me feel unsafe, never accused me of infidelity, and never ever threatened me. Josh had done all of those things within a month of being together. But none of the assholes in St. Louis could break the heart that Carter had already shattered.

The boy on the beach figured out how to get into investing, working his way from a startup he sold for an obscene amount of money. He stayed on as the company’s CEO and had done well for himself ever since. The only picture of him on the site was one with the company’s shareholders. There he was, second from the left, arms behind his back, with a slight smile pulling the corners of his mouth. His dark brown hair, shorter than it used to be, was slicked back, his face clean-shaven, looking every bit the young professional.

It was infuriating how good he looked in a suit. A guy shouldn’t be able to look equally sexy in a tie and black slacks as he did in torn jeans and weathered band tees.

The pose, hands behind his back, I guessed was intentional, since in any press photos I happened across online showed tattooed hands and arms with even more ink peeking out from the low hung collars of the muscle-tees he seemed to like to wear while out running.

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