Page 302 of Dark Love

“Dahlia.” I brush a finger across her cheek, wiping away a tear.

“Don’t try to talk me out of this. I need to see him.”

“Then we’ll all go talk to him together.” Eugenia decides the matter.

***

“Basil. How did you find me? A crazy man grabbed me and locked me in here. I thought I was going to die,” Monty cries as Basil steps into the room where I stashed him earlier.

I hate this. I hate everything about this. Yet, here I am with Dahlia in my arms, facing the man who almost caused her to take her life because of his twisted actions. “Are you sure you need to do this?” I whisper in her ear.

Dahlia nods.

“You lied to me.” Basil stares at Monty with Eugenia by his side.

“What are you talking about? Get me out of here. Before the crazy guy comes back.”

Monty hasn’t noticed me, it seems. Though he doesn’t seem to be handling waiting here. “Basil won’t be doing that.”

Monty’s eyes move to me. “He’s here. Why is he here with you? You need to save me. To get me out of this place.”

Dahlia shrugs my arms off and steps forward. There’s a strength in her that I’ve never seen before. “Why? Why did you do that to me?”

“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Monty shifts his desperate gaze to Basil. “You need to get me out of here. They’ve all gone crazy.”

Basil stalks up to Monty, getting in his face. “Answer her. Why did you do that? Why did my best friend hurt my sister?”

“To help you… I did it to help you. Back then, you hated it that guys were looking at your sister. So I fixed it for you.”

Is Basil going to believe the stupidity that just came out of Monty’s mouth?

“Fixed it?” Basil shakes his head. “You thought sharing a video of my sister naked with the entire school would fix it?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“The world saw my sister naked.”

Monty looks like he’d shrug if he wasn’t tied up.

I should have just killed him. This family thing was a bad idea. “He’s lying.” All eyes turn to me. I take that opportunity to pull Dahlia back into my arms. “Dahlia isn’t the only teenage girl he did this to. There were dozens. Ask him why his wife left him when his daughter turned thirteen.”

***

“Are you sure I can’t knock out a few of his teeth?” Basil rubs his swollen knuckles.

“No.” Dahlia chimes in for the first time in a while.

None of us saw any reason to stop Basil when he decided to beat on Monty.

“Why not? He deserves it.”

That and more. If I wasn’t holding tight on to the woman I love, I’d probably have shown Basil a few ways to hurt a man.

“Because I’m not the only one he hurt. And even though it’s tempting to tell you to have at it, they deserve to know who hurt them. They deserve the closure I got today, too.” Dahlia’s voice is strong and firm, even as she trembles slightly in my arms.

“My daughter isn’t being dragged through the judicial system and tortured by this piece of filth again.”

“I don’t mind, Daddy, if it means he goes to jail forever for what he did.”

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