“A message?” I asked.
“A dead cat,” she whispered. “He used its blood to write on the walls.”
She was pale and shaking, and my fist was clenching in anger at this unknown man.
“I will find you,” she whispered. “You won’t escape me again, kitten.”
I got up from my chair and walked over to her. She stood up and looked at me with wide eyes. The desperation in her eyes tugged at my heartstrings. She was begging me to save her.
“This is getting out of hand,” I said. “I will have a police detective visit you and investigate this matter.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “He will know that I told and—”
“And?” I asked.
She looked at me and shuddered, and I wondered exactly what this man had done to her that had left such a deep scar.
“Even if you have better contacts,” she said. “Even if you get the police to track him, he will know that I was the one to report him. It will make him angrier. It will make him—”
She winced at whatever memory flashed before her, and I grabbed her, pulling her close.
“I will help you,” I said. “I will keep you safe.”
She smiled at me, which threw me off, and said, “He would make fine work out of you. He would flay you and eat you up.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, raising my eyebrow.
“You might be strong and tall, but I doubt you could win against him. You don’t know what he can do. What lengths he can go to get to his goals,” she whispered.
She reached out and gently touched my cheek, “You are a good man, Gale. But you should stay out of this. He will hurt you too.”
I looked at her, thinking about this man, hidden in the shadows. I thought about her and how scared she must be right now. My heart was surging with the instinct to protect her. To send my best guards after her and make sure she stayed safe. And this feeling…it scared me. It frightened me that I felt so strongly about a girl I had barely known for a few weeks. It worried me that she had wormed her way into my heart. She had somehow climbed past the walls I had built and crept through the bare sand of my heart.
She made me feel the way Stella had made me feel. She reminded me of how Stella had torn through my heart. How fast I had fallen for her, and the pain and misery that followed afterward. She was already in my heart, even though I had only known her for a little while.
She looked at me with those eyes. Those damn eyes that always pulled me in. She placed her hand on my chest and smiled. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Gale. If he did anything to you, I would hate myself forever.”
At that moment, I hated her and myself. I hated the way I felt for her. I hated how I wanted to take her in my arms and never let her go. The thing that I had vowed to never feel again…how had it crept into my heart?
“You know, you are the one who has been taking me out on dates,” she said, changing the topic. “Next time, I will arrange one.”
“No,” I whispered. “It’s over.”
If I spent any more time with her, I wouldn’t be able to fight with my heart anymore. It was a mistake to agree to this in the first place.
“What?” she whispered, the smile fading from her face.
“We are done,” I said. “You said we will get it out of our systems, and that’s that. You are out of my system. We are done.”
I turned away from her so I wouldn’t have to see the hurt expression on her face.
“But, I thought—” she stammered.
“You thought wrong,” I said.
Her phone rang, interrupting the silence between us. She picked it up, and I could hear her soft voice as she spoke.
“Dad?” I heard her whisper. “Dad, what’s wrong? Daddy?”
