“I told you I was going to take care of you, Daisy. Whatever it takes. I’m going to find that motherfucker and put an end to him. You don’t have to be afraid.”
My gaze flashed down him again. Over the scars that I could barely make out in the dusky light. Some that I was sure he had sustained that night, but there were innumerable others that had to have been inflicted later.
He looked like a warrior who had fought a thousand battles.
Heartbreaker.
I definitely felt mine splintering apart right then.
“You say it like you’re going to…kill him or something.” I let go of a tittering laugh, trying to make light of it. Brush it off. Because there was no way he actually meant what he seemed to imply.
He only darkened further, a crash of that ferocity filling the space between us.
In discomfort, I fiddled with the hem of my sweatshirt and shifted my bare feet.
“That’s exactly what I mean.” His words were shards. Broken fragments that toppled out onto the floor.
A ball of razors suddenly formed in my throat.
Shock and confusion filling up my thoughts while my spirit settled on the truth.
He wasn’t the same person I knew.
“Should…?” I looked away before I forced myself to meet his gaze. “Should I be afraid of you?”
He’d warned me he was a bad man, but I’d refused to believe it.
Haunted, yes.
But I was having a hard time wrapping my head around what he was insinuating. Around what he’d become.
Questions swirled through my mind every time he left the house on his motorcycle or locked himself behind the door at the end of the hall.
A door he never allowed any of us to peek behind.
“I would never harm you.” A strike of severity flashed through the air. “But I would kill for you.”
His words impaled me like blades.
Or maybe he was the one who was being carved out by them. Cut wide open and revealing the secrets that hovered around his being.
The man just…laying it out.
Plain.
An offering.
“Have you…done it before?” I couldn’t believe this was the first real conversation we were having after what I asked him the first night we came here.
For the last two weeks, I’d been tiptoeing.
Trying to feel him out.
Attempting to understand a man I once knew better than anyone else.
Waiting for the right moment to broach the subject of my children again.
But the more I waited, the more I came to realize he was different. I’d been so reluctant to come here. To ask this of him. Not wanting to put him at risk but not knowing where else I could go.
