Page 27 of Prey

Instead, he was the dragon keeping the princess hostage.

“Why are you guys like this?” I forged on.

He pulled away from me, and I missed his heat instantly.

“What happened to you?”

Perhaps it was a trauma in his childhood, but this was not how a normal man reacted when he confessed to a woman that she was his weakness.

“Lots of things,” he said, making me slightly choked up.

I should not feel sorry for the man. I should not want to walk up to him and hold him tight, vowing never to let him go.

Perhaps there was something wrong with me as well.

“What?” I asked, my voice barely audible. But he heard me.

“What happened to you at fourteen?” he asked instead.

Now it was my turn to be closed off. “W-What do you mean?”

“It means I looked into you. When I decided that I would come after you as soon as I got out of prison. You’re the judge’s daughter, there should be nothing missing or suspicious about your life, but your parents pulled you out of school at fourteen, and there’s a chunk of those months missing after.”

“That’s none of your business.”

Perhaps I would have told him about everything that happened to me at fourteen, from the abduction to the cliffside and even to the dismissive way my parents had been about the entire event, yet became helicopter parents overnight, to the point of suffocation afterward.

I would have felt comfortable telling Xavier this, but not Roman.

I shook my head and got off my seat.

He took a step toward me, and I backed away. I did not need him to intimidate me with his sheer size.

But he kept coming closer, and it felt like everything in this room was getting smaller and closing down on me, making my vision fuzzy.

I couldn’t think.

“Stop!” I yelled.

To my surprise, he did, looking at me with wide, shocked eyes.

I took a deep breath. “It’s none of your business.”

“But there is a story there.”

“You wouldn’t tell me anything about your childhood. Why should I tell you anything about mine?”

“It’s not just my story to tell. It’s Micah’s too.”

“The man who hates me, you mean?”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

I shook my head. “No, he just wishes I was out of your life, and if I give him a good enough reason, he would do it, with or without your protest.”

And I knew what I said was true.

I had thought the name Micah sounded familiar when Roman introduced us, but now that the dots were starting to connect, I realizedwhyit sounded familiar.

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