My apologies would be worth next to nothing to Laina. She might not want to talk to me at all. Hell, she might take a single look at me, be reminded of Tessa, and order me out, in which case I’d have no choice but to listen.
I voluntarily walked away from my parents when I was young, when they forced that decision on me, so I didn’t know what it was like to lose a parent who actually gave a shit about you. No, I might not have been in the same position she was in now, but I had lost people I cared about. Not everyone I helped made a new life for themselves. Sometimes old habits died hard and pulled people so far down they felt helpless.
I made it to the room with the closed door, and though I hadn’t thought of what to say, I knocked without wasting any more time. Seconds went by, and I heard not a sound inside the room. She could be sleeping, or she could be laying in there, losing her mind to her grief.
Though a part of me wondered if I should give her space, I pushed into the room regardless, and I found her laying on her side on the bed. Her back was to me as I approached, so I had no clue whether or not Laina knew it was me, or if she thought I was one of her guys.
Slowly, I made my way toward the bed, sitting about halfway up it, close enough to her to be near but not so close that I was touching her. Out of all the things I could’ve said, I went with, “You have a lot of people down there who’re worried about you.”
I heard her breathe a little harder, and then, after a few seconds, she spoke: “Why are you here?”
What else could I tell her besides the truth? “I heard the news, and I was worried about you. I called Kieran. He told me where you guys were, and I came straight here.”
“Why do you care?” Her voice was totally different than what I was used to. Instead of the bold, confident Laina I’d met multiple times before, she sounded tired, weak, maybe even broken—something multiple kidnappings had never done.
Why did I care?Her question rang in my head a few times, and it took me far too long for me to wrestle with an answer that would suffice, “I just do. I care.”
Laina rolled over, sluggish in sitting up. Her eyes lifted, meeting my stare and holding it. They weren’t rimmed in red or extra watery; she hadn’t cried, not that I could tell. No, in fact, she held a deadly serious look as she whispered, “It was Tessa. I know it was.” She inhaled deeply, a long, even breath that drew out the next few seconds before she told me, “I’m going to kill her.”
Spoken so softly, and yet, though she sounded broken, I knew she wasn’t lying. That sentence was, perhaps, the most truthful thing she’d ever said to me.
“And if you try to stop me, I’ll kill you, too.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard a death threat sound so calm, so gentle. Again, she meant it, and for the next few moments, all I could do was sit there and let her words simmer inside me. Out of habit, I wanted to leap to protect Tessa and of course myself, but… but if there was one thing this city had taught me—one thing Laina had shown me—it was that my daughter had ceased to be my daughter a long time ago.
“I believe you,” I said, “and I won’t try to stop you.”
Laina almost seemed surprised. “You won’t?”
With a shake of my head, I said, “Some actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are the difference between life and death. I know you want vengeance, and I don’t blame you. I won’t stop you, but all I ask is that you give her the chance to come clean. If she’s responsible… she should admit it, just like she admitted to trying to have Kieran killed.”
She swung her legs out, hanging them off the side of the bed as she moved to sit closer to me. Her next words were so out of the blue I almost laughed: “Your daughter’s a bitch.”
“Yeah. She didn’t get that from me.”
“If she was more like you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” She sighed. “I never would’ve been kidnapped. I’d still have all my fingers.” As she said that, she lifted her left hand and bent the metal fingers fastened to the nubs attached to her knuckles. “My life would be so different if she was more like you. I probably would never have met Kieran, and without that first kidnapping, I never would’ve met Fang or Mike.” She turned those bright pink eyes to me. “Or you.”
There was a weight behind those two words, a weight I definitely noticed, but something stopped me from commenting on it. Strange as it might’ve been, I was pretty damn sure I felt the same. I missed Montana, yes, but there was something to be said about my time here, time I spent watching her, learning about her.
Laina’s gaze fell to her lap, and she toyed with her hands. “It doesn’t feel real. It’s been hours, but it still doesn’t feel real. When will it feel real?” Her voice cracked at the end, as she asked me that hard-hitting question.
I told her the truth: “I don’t know. It might feel real an hour from now, or tomorrow, or next week. Or maybe six months from now.” I studied her, feeling a heaviness settle on my chest as I looked at her from the side. “It may never feel real.”
“My dad raised me by himself. I loved him, but I never really got to be a kid. He got into politics, and then… then I had to smile, pretend, act for the cameras. I had to be the perfect daughter so he could show he was a good dad. For years, I thought that meant he wasn’t one.”
She bit her bottom lip. “I didn’t realize it until recently, because I spent so much time hating him. For a while, I thought he was responsible for my kidnapping. I thought it was him, and I spent two years watching him move on, watching him get married and keep smiling for the cameras. I hated him so much for it.”
Laina’s shoulders slumped. “But then when I got out… when I learned the truth, I felt so stupid. Could I really blame him for trying to find happiness again? We’re all human. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes.”
Wise words. It was something some people never learned, even after eighty years on this planet.
“I asked him if he’d leave the spotlight for me,” her voice broke, “and when he didn’t answer right away, I thought that was it. But he told me—” Her hands on her lap curled into fists. “—just recently, that he would. That he would leave it behind in a heartbeat for me. Maybe if I would’ve asked, if we would’ve left the city, he’d still be alive.”
The way she said that last part nearly broke my heart for her. Grief was never something one could easily wrestle with; if it was easy, then was it true grief? Did you actually care about that person? No. True loss and grief went hand-in-hand. While it was true everyone processed it differently, it still hurt, just in different ways.
And Laina? Laina was most certainly hurting. Her eyes had started to tear up. She was trying to hold it together, but slowly losing it. Maybe the shock was wearing off and the true weight of it all was finally crashing down upon her.
“You can’t think like that,” I told her. “Thoughts like that will only haunt you. There’s a whole world of different possibilities, but you can’t let every single one haunt you like ghosts.”
