Page 142 of Tempting Little Thief

“You know he sent people to follow him,” Dom’s voice comes from behind me, but I don’t turn around.

I know he’s not wrong. There is no way my dad allowed Bastian to walk out of here after that.

“Should we … help him?” Damiano asks hesitantly.

His loyalty to me adds to the war of emotions already raging in my chest, but this is Bastian.

I shake my head no. “They won’t find him.”

“Rocklin …” he disagrees, tone asking me to use reason, but I am.

My world is dark and daunting, but his is too, and he adapts in ways he can. Ways that work and help him in his personal pain. Our people are vicious, but I see that same shadow in Bastian’s eyes.

He isn’t a nobody.

He’s so much more.

Forcing my shoulders straight, I shake my head again, eyes still scanning over the darkness before me. “They won’t find him, Damiano. He’s … invisible.”

I got into that little club, ma, ’cause my pops beat silence into me, and those beatings taught me how to be invisible. You can’t touch what you can’t see, and you can’t find what you can’t hear.

His words replay in my head and with them comes a throbbing sense of regret.

“You should come inside.” Damiano’s hesitant voice comes from a little closer this time.

I whip around, eyes locking with his, and he simply pauses his advance, a small nod following as he turns, heading back into the building.

Frustration I’ve never felt before forms and knots in my throat and I grip my hair, glaring up at the stupid arch above me. I spin, shoving over a giant stone pot full of pink roses. The pot shatters, dirt spilling over into the grass as loose petals filter across the cement steps. The wind picks up right then, blowing them across the tip of my shoe, and I scream, but when an airy laugh sounds behind me, I swallow it halfway, anger threatening to explode from my chest as I face the person it came from.

Chloe fucking Carpo.

My jaw clenches so tight I can’t seem to open it to yell and scream at her like I want to. Why the fuck would she bring him here? She had to know what would happen.

Then she shakes her head at me as if she’s disappointed in my actions. As if she can’t believe what she’s seeing. As if she fucking knows me, and then she starts to speak.

“He took a risk coming here.” She states the obvious. “For you.”

My mouth opens, but when she shakes her head, it closes without permission.

“He had a hard life.”

“I know all about his life,” I spit out, annoyed that she knows anything about it. She can’t possibly know more than me.

“Did you know he had no idea how to dance?”

When my brows crash, she nods.

“I mean, he can dance like anyone else. To the beat of the music, to whatever feels right in the moment. But this?” She hooks her thumb over her shoulder and my eyes flick into the ballroom, swiftly raking over the couples in the center, midwaltz. “He didn’t know how to do that.”

She watches me, and for a long moment, I’m stuck staring until I catch exactly what she said.

Didn’t.

Hedidn’tknow how to do that.

Icy despair fills my veins, battling for dominance over the heat of jealousy burning through my blood.

“Shame, really.” She tips her head, wrapping her shawl tighter around her glitter-covered shoulders. “He never even got the dance he practiced so hard for.” She leaves me with that and walks away.

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