Luca’s.
I hadn’t even noticed how close he’d moved to the desk. It was a testament to the fact that I really was coming to trust all the men as much as I trusted Vaughn.
“No,” Luca said. “You’re not doing this.”
I knew it wasn’t really an order because I could hear his voice breaking.
He was upset.
And I knew why.
“What was his name, Luca?” I asked.
Luca actually paled. “What?”
“The boy… the one you met when you were looking for Gio. The one you had to forget.”
Luca looked at Vaughn briefly. “He told you?” he asked me. There was a little bit of hurt in his voice.
“No,” I quickly said. “He didn’t tell me anything. You did. That night on the porch at the house in Nevada… you said you had to forget a boy to find your son. You’ve never really forgotten him though, have you?”
The man hesitated, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “They called him Billy, but I don’t know if that was his real name or not.”
“Probably not,” I said. “They changed any names that sounded too unique. They let me keep my name but they always spelled it wrong. They said the name Alex was really common here in the U.S. But my name is spelled with an ‘s’ – I was named after my father’s father who was Polish.”
I didn’t say it out loud but my guess was that Gio likely had been given a new name as well.
“We’ll find another way, Aleks,” Luca said as he snapped the jewelry box shut. He kept his big hand on it, but when I leaned across the desk and reached for it, he released it.
“It’s my choice,” I said. I flipped the box back open. “Everything has been my choice from the moment Vaughn told me why he’d taken me. I don’t want that to change… I won’t let it,” I said firmly. I forced myself to pick up the collar. It barely weighed anything, but it might as well have weighed a hundred pounds.
I felt sick as I found the clasp and worked it loose. The party wasn’t for hours yet, but I needed to do this now so I could be one hundred percent focused on everything that was happening around me when the time came.
I swallowed back the bile that was trying to creep up my throat as I reached up to put the collar around my throat. I dropped my eyes and stared at the desk as I fumbled with the clasp.
But I couldn’t get it to snap together and all my effort to be strong felt like it was slipping out of my grip just like the frustrating clasp.
“James,” I whispered.
“I’ve got it, Aleks,” Vaughn said as his hands took over the task for me. When his fingers drifted down my neck and rested on my shoulders, I knew it was done. I could barely feel the collar, it was so light. But Icouldfeel it.
And I was still okay.
I pulled in a breath, then another.
It wasn’t until Luca handed me a tissue that I realized I’d been crying the whole time.
I was tempted to lighten the mood by coyly asking how it looked, but I knew I couldn’t pull it off. And from the looks on the faces of the men around me, I doubted any of them could find even a scrap of humor in the situation.
I reached up to touch the collar… no, the necklace, because that was all it really was. I’d take it off in a few minutes, but I wanted to prove to myself I could forget about it, so I stepped back into Vaughn’s body and reached up to link my fingers with the ones that were resting on my collarbone. His touch did what it always did and calmed me.
I looked around at each of them. They all had different emotions on their face.
Luca looked torn, Con looked like he was feeling completely powerless, and King… King just looked pissed.
I didn’t need to look at Vaughn to know what I’d see.
Because I saw a little bit of that emotion in everyone else’s gaze too.
