Page 31 of Dark Love

“You aren’t in your bedroom.”

Not in my… My eyes focus on something other than the haggard man sitting next to me. There are windows everywhere… The view of Urbium is like none I’ve ever seen. “Pinch me.”

“I’m not pinching you.”

“This must be a dream. Only I don’t know where I am. Are purple elephants going to fly by my head soon?” Twisting and turning my head, there isn’t anything I recognize, not the smooth black floors or the light gray bare walls, nor the massive bed with the softest sheets I’ve ever felt in my life. “This has to be a dream.”

“Dahlia, look at me.”

I turn to him only to find haunted eyes staring back.

“This is real.”

“But it can’t be real.” It can’t be.

“What do you remember about yesterday?”

Yesterday feels so long ago… The pain in my head makes remembering hard. “I remember getting up and going to work.” Adonis smiling down at me as he took a third brownie. That man is serious about his sweets.

“Anything after work?”

After work… “I got in a cab… to go to your club. Then nothing. Why can’t I remember? Why can’t I remember getting out of the cab? Why am I here? Where am I?”

Vex slides the chair forward, taking my hand in his.

A bit of the fear subsides.

“You are safe. Really hear my words when I say that. You are safe. Last night when you were at my club, someone slipped a roofie into your drink.”

“A… roofie. But that only happens in movies.” My body shakes.

“It happens all too often.”

“But—But—”

“You are safe. No one hurt you.”

I was drugged. “How do you know that?”

“We have video cameras in the club. You passed out in the bathroom, and the panic button was hit within thirty seconds of you entering. Security had the bathroom blocked off within thirty seconds of that.”

“Why am I here and not in the hospital?”

His free hand clenches into a fist that’s so tight his skin loses all pigment. “Because I needed to make sure you were safe.”

I was drugged. My body collapses back against the padded headboard. I was drugged. Someone drugged me. “Who? Why did they do this to me?”

“We don’t know.” His eyes move to the floor.

Vex is lying. “That’s a lie. You have cameras. They’d show you exactly who did this.”

“Dahlia, leave it alone.”

“No. No. No. You can’t lie to me. I need to know the truth. Because right now I’m going out of my mind and lies will make it worse. I need to trust you. I need to know that when you say I am safe and nothing happened that you aren’t lying to me.”

“Dahlia, I’m not like the other men you know.”

That’s pretty obvious.

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