Page 53 of Dark Night Golden Dawn
“Do you remember Avery Hargrove?”
Her heart sank. So this was about Avery? Was he attracted to her? Her skin prickled with jealousy she wished to Aphora she didn’t feel. She nodded, her mouth pressing into a grim line.
“I ran into her at a gallery in Nea Sterlis last winter and she told me a story about Mark Easton that worried me.”
Surprise pulsed through Harlow, sending tiny shockwaves coursing through her. “What?”
“They were together in secondary…”
“At boarding school?”
Finn nodded. “Yes. And he was so controlling and violent that her parents had her transferred here to that academy downtown.”
“Oh…” Harlow’s voice was soft. She’d always thought it was her fault that Mark acted the way he did. It’s what he’d said so many times,You bring out the worst in me, Dollface. I can’t help it. I love you so much, it makes me lose my mind.
“I knew I had no right to get involved in your life, Harls, but Avery warned me that she’d heard from other women he’d been with that he’d escalated his behavior in the time since they were together… That he was worse now. When he was with her, he’d never hurt her, not physically anyway. But he broke her things, yelled at her a lot…”
His voice drifted as he searched her eyes. She knew what he wanted to ask. But there was a blank spot in her mind where that information should be. She stayed very, very still, waiting for him to continue.
“I arranged for him to meet Olivia—I knew from various sources that she was interested in wealthy human men, and I made sure they’d meet, and that she would be primed to be interested in him.” The breath he let out should have been one of relief, but he didn’t look relieved. Just worried, and slightly ashamed of himself.
“How?” Harlow asked.
He shrugged. “Do you really want to know the details? It worked. I interfered, and it worked, but not the way I thought it would… I thought…”
Harlow understood then and laughed, the sound dry and brittle in her ears. “You thought I’d find out and leave him.”
He nodded, guilt clouding his eyes, as though he’d just realized how he’d set her up for more pain, not less. “But something else happened instead, didn’t it?”
“He was sleeping with other women before her, Finn. I didn’t leave him then. I didn’t think I deserved better. He kicked me out though, and it’s probably the best thing that could have happened, even though it was awful.”
She thought it was anyway. The glass wall between her and that memory was opaque as ever. Harlow took a deep breath. “You helped me. It didn’t work out the way you thought it would, but you did help me. I don’t know if I ever would have left on my own.”
He was lost at sea in his own emotions, a frown furrowing his brow. Finn had always liked things to be cut and dry, bad or good, and this wasn’t one of those things. What he’d done, all these things he’d done, they’d been for the right reasons, but they’d hurt her just the same. Harlow sensed he was seeing the bigger picture as they spoke, understanding the depths of how his actions had reverberated in her life for years. “I feel like it was cowardly now—like I should have come to get you.”
“I wouldn’t have gone,” she said, her voice small and quiet. “Back then, I wouldn’t have thought I deserved to leave with you, or to be protected like that.”
“And now?” There was no hope in his voice.
Maybe the smart thing to do was talk about it more. Go over it all again and again until she had more information. But she’d had enough for one night. She’d need time to process all of this, understand it better for herself, but she wanted to be close with someone who loved her, someone who’d made mistakes, but had made them trying to protect her. The one thing she knew in this moment, with all the fucked up things she’d done, was that no one was perfect. No love was perfect, and sometimes people doing their best messed up. She did, all the time.
Harlow wanted what was behind that once-locked door that opened into something new. And even if she wasn’t ready to fully admit that yet, she was willing to walk to the threshold and step between to see what was possible on the other side. “Now I want what I’ve wanted since our last night together.”
His eyes lifted. “What’s that?”
“To have another night with you.”
Finn’s jaw clenched. “Just one night?”
“We’ll start with one, and then another… I need to go slow, Finn. I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the past few months. In a lot of ways I’m over what happened with Mark, but I’m not healed. Not yet.”
“We can go as slow as you want,” he said, pulling her onto the floor and into his lap. He cradled her close to him and his familiar, sensual smell filled her nose as he held her tight against him. “What about my parents? They obviously want the same things they always have.”
Harlow thought of the image of the snakes in the Merkhov book. She should tell him. This was the perfect moment, but she couldn’t make the words come out. She was still shaky around the edges of her trust. She could tell him as soon as she was sure of him.
“They canwantanything they please,” she spat, venomous hatred for Aislin and Connor McKay rising in her chest. “There’s nothing that says we have to give it to them.”
She looked up to find Finn’s eyes glowing at the ferocity in her voice. “My brave girl.”
