CHAPTER FOUR
VALEN
All I see is her face.
The way the color drained from her skin when I told her I’d been beaten. The way her entire body seemed to collapse inward when I said August fifteenth. The way she whisperedwe were friendsas though the words were glass shards cutting her throat on the way out.
Roman sits in silence. He knows better than to speak when I’m like this—locked in my own head, trying to solve a puzzle when half my pieces were destroyed.
“She thought I abandoned her,” I finally say.
“Seems like it.” His shoulders slump on a heavy exhale. “She wears her trauma while you use yours as a shield. Whatever you guys were running from that night…” He shivers.
“But she knew. She’s known this whole time. And I—” I press the heels of my palms into my eyes. “My mind is a locked door, but my body knows her. I have this…this feeling, deep in my chest. I…ache when I look at her. It’s as though she’s a piece of me, and it’s so fucking weird. It’s messing me up inside. Something terrible happened to her. Something I was involved in.”
“You don’t know that.”
Don’t I though? The two things I’ve always known to be true about my life are the unyielding knowledge that I had let someone down and a determination to never do it again.
“Do you think she searched for me?” More guilt settles like Tetris pieces.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if she did, V. Mom was clear that you shouldn’t tell anyone at the cult that you were a Harrington. And you always swore that you only gave Clover our first names. After…the accident, mom paid a lot of money to have your online presence completely erased.”
“She did?” I guess I hadn’t asked. I couldn’t be on screens for a long time during my recovery, and once I got home, I wanted nothing to do with social media.
“Yes, and we all thought it was a good idea for you to stay offline. When we opened Styx and Stone and you wanted to be in the field, keeping you out of the public eye served that purpose too. So even if Clover could’ve found a connection to us, all she would have turned up is one of Grant’s many fundraisers or Chase’s latest date.”
“That must have hurt her even more. Never knowing.”
“You’ve both been through a lot,” he says like a fucking diplomat, never allowing me to sit in the guilt the way I should.
I grunt in response.
He shakes his head. “You staying out here the rest of the night?”
I look three houses down, to the windows glowing at the edges where she’s peering through the glass, as if she’s searching for the ghost who haunts her.
What if it’s me?
Rip says she does this every night. As if she’s trying to block the darkness from her sanctuary, blasting it away with sheer wattage.
“Yeah.” I tug on my neck. Spending the night hunched over in a sedan will be killer on my back, but I can’t bring myself to leave either.
The scared little Honeybee draws me to her in a magnetic way I’m not strong enough to avoid.
“Rip’s working in shifts with Cody tonight,” Roman says, resigned to my decision. “They’ll be right out front. You don’t have to be the one who stays.”
“I do though.” I wasn’t there for her… “Fuck me.”
“What?” He scans our surroundings, searching for a new threat. Unfortunately, it’s only happening in my mind.
Acid burns the back of my throat. “Roman. I—I was beaten.” My stomach hollows out as suffocation sets in. “If that happened to me…” On instinct, my gaze drifts back to her home. “Then what the fuck happened to her?”
He sucks in a ragged breath. “V, what we saw tonight?—”
“She’s terrified.”
“She’s traumatized,” he says, and I force myself to look him in the eye. “That house. The lights. The sensory furniture. The way she moves along the walls, anticipating an attack.” He pauses as the pulse in my neck fights against my skin. “That’s not just past trauma—she’s actively living in it.”
