Page 38 of Pray for Scars
Not for the first time, I’m wondering why the fuck I wish he was.
Why the fuck I’m running if I can’t stand to be away from him.
Self-preservation.
I’ve always been good at that.
Chapter Ten
Maverick slamshis fist against the table between us, making our glasses rattle. His eyes are narrowed on me, lined with red, and I see the veins in his forearms. I smell the pot he was smoking before I got here. But it’s taking more and more of it these days to calm Mav’s coldness.
“I told you I didn’t fucking trust you with her,” he growls at me.
I don’t say anything. I just curl my fingers around my glass, bring the whiskey to my lips, swallow it down, no longer wincing at the taste. It’s my third one on this fucked-up Saturday morning. I’m not wincing at anything anymore.
“How thefuckdid she get out of your fucking house?”
I smile at that question, my eyes on Mav, but I’m not seeing him. Not seeing anything in his house. I’m seeing her, sprinting through the woods behind our cul-de-sac, probably not quite sober, wondering how she’d get her pretty little ass back to fucking Jeremiah Rain.
“Well, Mav, you see, she opened the door.” I throw up my hands, my drink sloshing, and I’m still smiling. “And walked out.” I wink at him. “Sometimes there’s no grand plan. Sometimes it’s that easy. You justwalk out.”
I set my drink down, clasp my hands together. I focus on him as he stares at me, his elbows on the table, hand beneath his chin, his lips parted.
“Are you…are you fucking joking?”
I don’t reply.
“And why the fuck didn’t you stop her?”
“I was asleep.”
“You were…asleep?You didn’t think to, I don’t know,set the fucking alarm?”
I shrug. “You seem really uptight about this, Mav—”
“You’re not?” he snarls at me.
Oh, I’m more than fuckinguptight.But my dad’s plane lands today. Do I want her in my house? Yes. Do I want my dad’s hands on her? Not yet.
Mav slams his fist on the table again when I don’t answer him.
I shouldn’t have sent my father’s guards from the church home; they could’ve been here in seconds. I shouldn’t have left mine at Liber. But my father had meetings in Moscow, and I knew it was my shot at Sanctum. To make her remember in the depravation room. To make her remember everything they wanted her to forget. Everythingshewanted to forget.
And I needed her at that party. As much as I don’t want my father to get his hands on her, I don’t want anyone else to, either.
“What did she see?” Mav asks, his tone softer.
I shrug.
“You don’t fucking know? All of that at Liber, andyou don’t know?”His temper is rising.
I can’t find it in me to care.
“You do understand what this means, don’t you?”
I lean back in the chair at the dining room, fold my arms, tilt my head back.
“It means that whenDominuslands back on US soil, he’s going to find her himself and snap her fucking neck,” Mav continues.
