Page 75 of Meet Me In The Dark

“No. Same as always, although they did taunt me bytelling me the clock’s ticking. ‘Tick tock,’ one of them said, and if he weren’t holding a gun, I would have walked right up to him and kneed him the balls.” She shook her head. “Something’s happened, I can tell. Did Chris visit you? Micah, you’re shaking.” She walked over to Micah, and Luke—who had forced himself not to think about it—couldn’t help but look at her cut up bare feet. “Someone tell me what’s going on.Now.”

Something had changed while she’d been gone. Kara was already worried. The phrase “tick tock” had echoed in her head all the way down the hall on the march back to the cell. The one guard had even winked at her when he unlocked the door and shoved it open.

“I’ll tell you, baby,” Micah said, inhaling and exhaling slowly, as if he were trying to get himself back under control. That alone was cause for concern. “Conor here has the stupid fucking idea that when we get out of here, we need to let you go.”

Kara’s nightmare—the one where all three men told her they loved her and then sent her packing,literally—came back to her. She’d told herself it would never come true, and yet here they were, talking about doing the same thing.

Well, Conor was, anyway.

She tried not to blow up. Tried to calm herself down, to explain to herself that he had and was still suffering a major trauma, and it had fucked up his already fucked up brain. But when her anger at Conor’s bullshit decision met her panic at being left behind, it was like a lit match to a fuse.

No. She wasn’t going to have a panic attack.

She wasn’t going to blow up at them.

Just breathe. You’re okay. All you have to do is breathe.

Except she wasn’t okay, was she?

“You dumbass,” she exploded. “You complete, utter fucking dumbass.” Turning away from Micah, she stomped toward Conor, who was reclined against the wall, and shoved him on his good side.

He still flinched.

Good.

“You fuckingdumbass,” she repeated, feeling her face get wet.

Crying.Fucking great.

Fine. He’d seen her at her worst, he could handle her angry tears. Because Kara hadn’t been this angry at him since he’d first kidnapped her. In fact, she might be angrier now than she was then.

“You want to leave me?” She hated how high pitched her voice sounded.

Conor shook his head. “No, free girl. I don’t wantto leave you. I want to give you your life back.”

Kara tried to inhale, to clear her mind, so she didn’t strangle him. She failed. “What life? What life, Conor? Living alone in my bland apartment with my one friend, going to my stupid corporate job, volunteering at the farmers market as if that could bury the truth of how goddamned lonely I was, how unfulfilled I felt with my life?” Distantly, she felt her heart speeding up, anxiety keeping pace with her anger. If she weren’t careful, the former would outpace the latter.

“Kara, sweetheart…” Luke said.

Kara whirled around on him. “Do you agree with this? You want to what, walk away from me, too? After everything? Haven’t I fucking proven myself yet?”

Luke tilted up his head to look at her, straining at his bonds. “As long as this is what you want, then this is what I want.”

Kara covered her face with her hands. “Have I not made it clear? Get it through your stupid fucking heads. All three of you. What I want isyou.”

Luke nodded. “Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.”

Micah cleared his throat. “To be fair, I wasn’t a part of this.”

“Kara,” Conor said, his tone broken, his eyes almost wild. “You think Iwantto give you up? I heard what you said. You want to be like us? You want to kill people? For money? I like our lives, now, but you could be so much more.Haveso much more. We dragged you out of the light and into the darkness, literally kicking and screaming, and I’m sorry it took me so long to see it, but it was wrong of me. Of us. If the professor doesn’t kill me, you leaving us will, but it’s not about what I want anymore. It’s about what you need.”

It was amazing, truly. How anger could be so all-encompassing, it made her forget everything else. Forget the dirty, dank cell she was locked in. Forget the damages her lovers had suffered. Forget Damocles’s sword hanging over her head, hanging on by a thread and the tick of a clock counting down the hours to her death. Until all that existed was Kara and the men who surrounded her at three corners, so she was literally the center point of their triangle. And the man she faced, who she loved, who was such a fucking idiot she could happily rip his head off.

“What Ineed? You’re so sure of what I need, you didn’t even think to ask me? Conor, you’ve read me well in the past. You knew minutes after meeting me that I needed control taken from me, sexually, and I needed to be pushed,otherwise. You figured out I was running from myself and my shame, and how unhappy I was when you kidnapped me. You know a lot, but this, you don’t know. You don’t know what I need, but you know how you could find out? Byaskingme. Bylistening.By trusting me when I tell you that what I fucking need isyou.”

Conor’s throat worked, but he said nothing.

She wanted to kill him, for being so stupid, and breaking her heart in the process.

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