“Like someone took you,” he growls into the phone.
“Okay,” I say as I walk over to the windows by the lobby’s lounge area. Once I’m staring out onto the busy street, I make the decision to try him. I know I can trust Tyler to keep my secrets, but I don’t know if I can trust him to handle the truth. While his head might have gone to dark places, that doesn’t mean his mind is ready to accept them. “Let’s say someone did take me,” I whisper since I’m not alone. “Would that change anything?”
“What the fuck, Aurelia?” I picture Tyler squeezing his eyes closed and rubbing his brow bone. “Are you serious?”
I chew on my lip. “Maybe.”
“Who was it? Who took you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I sigh as I scan the crowd of people walking to and from. “I left them, and now I’m here, and I’d like to—”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupts. And he shouts, “Them?”
“Oh, shit,” I swear under my breath. I didn’t actually mean to reveal that much.
“What the hell do you meanthem? As in more than one?”
“Ty… Untwist your panties. I told you it’s not important.”
“Goddamn it, Aurelia.”
I lean forward and rest my forehead against the cool glass. “I know.”
“I don’t like this,” Ty grumbles, and I roll my eyes.
“Hence why I didn’t tell you.”
“But what did you mean by you left?” he prods in a whisper like he’s afraid of someone overhearing. “You didn’t escape? They just let you leave?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
The line goes quiet again and then, “What are you telling me, Aurelia?”
I haven’t even begun to reach the tip of the iceberg, so I straighten and whisper, “Everything.”
Tyler asks yet another question, but I don’t hear a word of it as my gaze catches on a figure with broad shoulders encased in a white T-shirt and towering at least a head above everyone else moving through the crowd.
My stomach clenches when a feeling of recognition washes over me, and I immediately press myself against the glass to get a better look. It’s not unusual for me to see my mountain men everywhere I look, but after a week of feeling insane and like I’m hallucinating, I’ve learned to ignore it.
But I can’t brush it off this time because while the accelerated heartbeat every time I think I see them is like an old friend, the tingling sensation down my spine that tells me they’re near is very much new.
But it can’t be him.
Because Thorin is trapped in a coma in a hospital in Canada with long tresses that I miss seeing cascade over his powerful shoulders and frame his face whenever he fucked me senseless.
This man’s hair is much too short, barely more than two or three inches long, showing off the strong column of his neck. He also doesn’t have Thorin’s panther-like gait, walking with less control and a slight limp as if the simple act is sapping too much of his energy.
Despite the rationale, my gaze doesn’t leave him until he turns the corner and disappears from view.
Gotta get it together, bitch.
I force myself to walk away from the window, but once I’m outside, I stop short when I see a disheveled White man in his early thirties with an overgrown beard and haunted, bloodshot eyes lurking in the darkened alley next to the building. No one else seems to notice him, immediately dismissing him as another of Los Angeles’s seventy-five thousand homeless, but no one else seems to be the center of his focus either.
He watches the comings and goings of the building closely, and a cold feeling sinks into my bones when he straightens at the sight of me, but somehow, I don’t think he’s a fan.
No, that’s deep-seated hatred pinning my feet in place.
I’m so stunned by the look in his eyes, searching frantically for the word to define it, that I don’t notice the gun until it’s too late.
