Page 92 of Ruin Me, Daddy

Richard leaned down to press a kiss to Silver’s forehead, then gave Ice a sharp nod before following his wife out the door. All the air rushed from Ice’s lungs, and his knees gave out. Thankfully, the chair was there to catch him, though it did nothing for the crushing pain in his chest.

“She’s wrong.”

Jerking forward, he laid his hand on Silver’s stomach. “Hey, sleepy girl. How’s your pain? Do you need something? Let me go find your nurse.”

“No. No nurse. Not yet.” Her eyes were open and clear for the first time since she’d been brought in. Clear, and burning with righteous fury.

There was a lot of that going around.

Ignoring the fury for now, he plastered on a smile. “Baby, you need to stay on top of the pain. Let me call someone for you, and then we can talk.”

“She’s wrong,” Silver repeated, freezing him in place as he reached for the button to call the nurse. “You aren’t responsible for what happened to me. This?” She raised her bound hand. “This was Ace, and Ace alone. He chose to lure me to that apartment, he chose to tie me to that chair, and he chose to ruin my fucking hands. So don’t you dare, for one fucking second, let him off the hook for any of those choices by taking that blame on yourself. You hear me, Elias Turner?”

A million arguments bounced around inside his mind. But all that mattered right then was keeping Silver calm, to keep her from hurting herself even more than she already was, so he simply nodded. “I hear you, baby.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“Promise me that you won’t blame yourself for what he did. We both fucked up by not being more open with him about what we’d done, but that doesn’t justify his actions. Plenty of people get their hearts broken and don’t lash out the way he did.”

“I know.” Too exhausted, too heartbroken for anger, Ice had to settle for the guilt threatening to strangle him. “But I should have told him the second I left Black Light. Maybe if I’d been honest with him from the start, you wouldn’t be lying in a fucking hospital bed right now.”

“Or maybe he would have murdered you on the spot. He’s not well, Ice. He hasn’t been well for a really long time.”

Something in her tone told him there was more there than what she’d let on so far. “What aren’t you telling me, Silver?”

Letting her head fall back against the pillow, she closed her eyes, misery etched into every line of her perfect face. “He was convinced we’d get back together, just like we always did. It didn’t seem to matter how many different ways I told him it was over, he just kept hounding me about it. Texting me constantly, calling me, talking to me like I was still his. Nothing ever seemed to get through to him. And that’s not on you, or me. That’s… there’s something broken inside him, Ice.”

“This was happening while you were here?” Maybe he wasn’t too tired for fury, after all. “And you didn’t tell me?”

One dark eye peeked open. “Sorry.”

If she hadn’t been lying in a hospital bed, he would have been tempted to bend her over the closest surface and spank her ass until she promised never, ever to keep anything from her Daddy again. But she was in that bed, and despite what she’d said, it was at least partially his fault.

So he smiled and brushed a lock of hair from her face. “We can talk about it when you’re better.”

Snorting out a laugh, she closed her eye again. “You really are shook up if you’re not threatening to beat my ass for keeping all that from you.”

That much seemed to go without saying, so he didn’t bother to respond. He just pushed the button to call for the nurse.

CHAPTER 33

SILVER

TWO MONTHS LATER

Physical therapy was a bitch.

It was helping though, or at least that’s what her therapist said whenever she complained about not seeing any progress. They’d warned her after her surgery that as promising as her initial results were, she might never get back to where she’d been before the attack.

That news had given her more than a few bad moments over the past few weeks. But Ice had been there for every meltdown, every fit of rage, every screaming nightmare she’d woken from in the middle of the night, clawing and fighting her way to safety the way she hadn’t been able to in real life.

Ace was out on bail, because in the American justice system, money and fame were the best legal defense a man could have. The DA here in Charleston had assured her they would do everything they could to see justice done, but she wasn’t holding out hope. Her own lawyers had cautioned her that a plea bargain was more likely, and if he ever actually saw the inside of a prison cell it wouldn’t be for more than a few months.

She tried not to think about that too much. Even if he walked away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, she consoled herself with the knowledge that his career was just as ruined as her own. The internet had done what it did best and taken him down hard as soon as the news had leaked. And while there were still those dark pockets of the worldwide web where they whispered about what a slut she was, how she’d driven a good man to insanity by spreading her legs for his best friend, for the most part, public opinion was on her side.

“Hey baby.” Ice greeted her with a smile and a glass of wine when she walked through the front door, as he had every day when she’d gotten home from physical therapy for the past two weeks. Once she’d reached the point where her doctors had cleared her to drive, she’d insisted on taking herself to her appointments, which had been the source of a very long fight and more than a few growled threats about the state of her ass.

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