Page 24 of Selling Innocence

Which is why he tried to kill me, I guess.

I touched my side, the scar from the bullet wound he’d left me with, the one I kept hidden. It always made me feel pathetic, as if nothing more than a sign that one of the few people who was supposed to love me unconditionally hadn’t. He not only hadn’t saved me, but had been the one to shoot me just to hurt Nem, just to cause pain to others. He hadn’t even shot me because he was mad at me, but because I was that unimportant to him.

A burning in my eyes made me blink quickly to clear it away.

The phone chimed again. You look up at the sky a lot. Why?

I gave Tor a smile as a thank you for changing the subject, for trying to draw me out of the painful memory. Even if he didn’t know what had caused it, he’d paid enough attention to know when my mood had shifted.

So I answered him honestly. “I was alone a lot when I was a kid. Everyone around me was always too busy for me. I’d had enough one night, when I was ten, and I called one of the men who did our security work. He was like family to me, but because my father sent me away to boarding schools, I hadn’t seen him in a long time.”

As I told the story, the desperation of that night came back to me. I’d called Dane, needing to hear his voice, to feel as if I hadn’t lost everything that mattered to me. My mother had been gone, my sister gone, then I’d lost my home and my father and the Quad when he’d sent me away.

“I told him I was running away, that I didn’t want to be in boarding school anymore and would take a train to them. Of course, I didn’t realize that I was in another country and couldn’t cross the ocean on a train, but it was the only threat I had. The bodyguard, he was like a brother to me, and he told me to stop, to look up at the sky. I did it, and he told me he was looking at that same sky, that no matter how far apart people are, they’re still connected. They’re still on the same Earth, under the same sky. He told me to look up whenever I felt lonely and know that the people I care about, the people who care about me, are looking at it, too. It made me feel like I wasn’t abandoned, that I wasn’t totally alone.”

As soon as I poured out my story, I chuckled. “I guess that sounds pretty pathetic, huh? And, I know, the poor, lonely rich girl doesn’t really have any room to complain.”

Everyone has problems. No one has a perfect life. You don’t have to pretend to be okay when you aren’t.

The words on the screen blurred, and this time just blinking couldn’t deal with the tears. Instead, I used the back of my hand to wipe them away, embarrassed to have Tor witness the little breakdown. “Sorry,” I rushed out, sitting up and turning to face him.

With the lights in the backyard off, I struggled to see the details of the man before me. I’d seen him enough to know what he looked like normally, but he wasn’t the type I could just stare at. It seemed he caught me each time I tried, as though he’d honed his senses so well that he felt when people looked at him.

His hair was dark and his eyes held a golden hue. He had a mustache and a goatee, both thin and well groomed. A septum ring hung from the center of his nose, small enough to fit snug against him. Despite that, he didn’t look like some rebel.

His hair was buzzed to his scalp on the sides and back, with the top longer, wavy, and pushed to one side. He was lean, and usually wore business-casual clothing, all seemingly expensive enough to fit in anywhere but not so trendy as to draw attention.

In fact, everything about him screamed a person meant to blend into the background.

It made me wonder who he was.

Who any of them really were. I’d spent a week here and I knew little more than the basics.

I knew Hayden ran a security company, that Vance was a womanizing artist from a rich and famous family, that Tor couldn’t speak and that Char was a dick.

That was it.

You shouldn’t get close to us.

The message made me frown. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I? I mean, you all brought me here. I get that I might be in a worse position if you hadn’t, but that doesn’t change that I’m your prisoner right now. I can’t go anywhere, can’t reach out to anyone, so you four are all I have.” Just admitting that aloud tanked my mood further.

Worse…as the days passed, I couldn’t stop myself from recognizing that the longer this took to resolve, the worse it could get.

I normally spoke to Nem, Jarrod or the Quad daily. Since moving, the longest I’d gone without contact had been three days, and that had been during finals.

Sure, Jarrod had bought me some time, but even if they hadn’t worried about the lack of calls, I had no doubt they monitored the security of my apartment. They’d know I hadn’t come or gone in a week.

It wasn’t a question of if they would come looking, but rather when.

I glanced at Tor again, the same thing hitting me that had before. No matter these men’s pretty faces, the civility they treated me with, they were men accustomed to violence.

That sort of thing left a stain on a person, and maybe because I’d grown up surrounded by it, I could always spot it on a person. It was in the way they walked, the way they held themselves, as if by spilling blood a person’s very being changed.

Tor might have treated me with respect, might have not given me reason to fear him, but that didn’t change that he was capable of horrible things. If Nem came here, if the Quad did, they’d risk themselves for me.

That was the last thing I’d ever wanted. My family meant far too much to me.

I glanced at the phone in my hand, wondering if I could call Nem.

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