Page 43 of Destroy (Deadly Hearts 2)

What the fuck else can I say? Damn you Declan for leaving.

Her shoulders slump and she bows her head. “I was with Cillian earlier,” she starts and my heart stops beating. If she tells me that he touched her in any way, I will go back out there, track him down and beat him to a pulp before I rip his heart out with my bare hands.

“I had a panic attack, but then I got pissed. Really pissed about all of this. I hate being this way. So scared, so vulnerable. I needed to do something to push past it. I needed to take back control of my own body.”

“Oh?” David croaks out.

I shoot him a glare to shut the hell up. The last thing we want is to judge her.

She nods. “I started to masturbate. It was awful. I was so alone and terrified of what I was doing, but I needed it.”

“You were…alone?” I ask carefully.

She nods. “But then Cillian came to find me, and it lit a spark deep inside me. I felt something. I was aroused. I wanted him to watch. He didn’t want to, he wanted to leave, but I begged him to stay. He did. He watched me come and I liked it. I’m so sorry.” She falls to her knees again.

“Did he touch you,” I rasp.

“No. He didn’t. He was perfect. He knows what I need, and he knows that without your consent, with my consent, he won’t do anything. He wants to. We both do. There’s something there…Declan knows. It’s why he was so afraid to tell me about him.”

“You want him?” I feel like my life is draining away.

“Not in that sense,” she whispers. “I can’t. Not yet. But…”

Relief floods me. She didn’t go to him for something that she thought we couldn’t give her. She just needed him to be there to make her feel secure, so she could push past the crippling fear she was feeling. I can live with that. It remains to be seen if I, or any of us, can accept him in her life as one of us. I wonder what Declan has to say about that.

“You did nothing wrong, sweetheart,” I tell her after a beat. “You did what you needed to do to take control. None of us blame you for that.”

“I blame myself,” she mutters.

“Well, don’t,” I say and go to her. I stroke her hair and she lets me.

“Please forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” I whisper.

“Please,” she says, looking up at me with tears running down her cheeks.

I sigh and make a decision. There is only one thing I can think of right now how to handle this. I take her hand and lead her up the stairs to the master bedroom. Ramsey and David follow close behind.

I can sense their unasked questions, their fear at what I’m going to do, but they needn’t worry. It’s not something that will break her. She has a choice to make.

I stop at the big, walk-in wardrobe with the sliding door and open it.

“Get in,” I say. “If you really feel like you need absolution for what you did, get in the wardrobe and stay there until I come back for you.”

You could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows.

She takes a step forward, pulling out of my grasp and enters the wardrobe. She sits on the floor, her back against the wall, her legs stretched out.

Her eyes find mine and I nod. I slide the door closed, leaving her in the dark, enclosed space, hating myself for what I’m doing but I have no choice. Declan isn’t here to decide what to do with her and this is the best I’ve got that doesn’t require anything physical. If she didn’t want to do it, she didn’t have to. I gave her a choice and she made it.

I brush past David and Ramsey and walk slowly down the stairs. There is a phone call I have to make, and I need to do it now.

Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I dial quickly as Ramsey and David thunder back down the stairs.

“You can’t leave her in there,” David exclaims as Declan answers the video call.

“What is it?” he asks immediately.

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