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Sloane, her hand on the wall, lingered in the stairwell. She sat, as if she’d been there for a while.
As if she’d been listening the whole time.
My phone was still lit. My mom had hung up, but I hadn’t done anything after. Sloane got up slow. “I was going to tell you.” She chose this as her first thing to say, as if I hadn’t caught her running from me. She took a step down the stairs. “Your parents thought it’d be best we come here, though. Texted me that in the car after I responded to them.”
Because they’d all been in on it, tricked me. My gaze sliced away from Sloane to the floor, and when she eased beside me, I recoiled.
She cringed. “Dorian, I wanted to tell you.”
“That’s the thing. You didn’t.” I put my hands together, my laughter dry, rough. I faced her. “Because if you did, you would have, and long before I caught you climbing down that tree.”
She wouldn’t have run, which was something she’d said she wasn’t going to do to me ever again. She’d told me she was going to trust me, and if she did, I wouldn’t have found her trying to leave.
“I didn’t want to be a liability,” she gasped, her eyes red, wet. She put her hands out. “He was using me for so long, and I didn’t want him to even have the option of hurting anyone else.”
“So, you run again,” I said, nodding. “And when you got caught, you helped my parents manipulate me to keep me out of the situation.”
It sounded worse out there, the betrayal worse. In all honesty, I got why the people I loved banded together to do such a thing. They were just trying to protect me, protect her.
It was Sloane’s lack of faith that got to me the most, and she didn’t trust that I could have taken care of her. I got up, and when she started to follow me, I raised my hands.
She played with hers. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.” There was so much irony in what she just said. By trying not to hurt me, she had. She blinked down a tear. “Please say something.”
She didn’t want me to say something.
So, I didn’t.
Instead, I left her standing there, then proceeded to lock down the house. I was going to keep her safe tonight and do whatever I had to.
Even if she didn’t believe in my capability.
Chapter Forty-Five
Sloane
The dark prince slept with a shotgun in his lap.
But he slept.
He hadn’t asked to sleep with me, beside me, but I didn’t think he would even if I had asked him. Instead, he took the corner of my bedroom, his ankles crossed, his head touching the wall. The location happened to be where the only window in the room was, and he took it, the gun he’d gotten from the shed out back across his legs. He slept restlessly, sporadic between tugs of the curtain, but when he did, I watched him.
I couldn’t help it, I guess.
I used to enjoy watching him in those rare moments when he forgot to leave my bedroom. The morning rays of early sun always hit his hair, flecks of gold bouncing off his feathered locks. It was always messy as hell before he woke up, perfect, and the result of a late-night fuck.
He always teased me when he caught me looking.
There was no teasing now, none of that at all, and this morning, I had to pretend to be sleeping when he ultimately got up. I’d just about vomited last night when I saw his reaction to being tricked.
This morning, I took the coward’s way out and pretended I didn’t notice when he peered at me from the side of the bed. He’d gotten up, come over, but just stood there, his dark shadow looming largely over the sheets. He lingered for so long, and my body called out to him. That he’d touch me and tell me everything was going to be okay.
But then, he left.
“You talk to Dorian this morning?” I asked Ares what felt like hours later. I ended up going back to sleep after Dorian left but woke up again when my phone rang. I draped my arms over the sheets, watching as my twin brother scowled at me through FaceTime.
“Yeah, I did, and he’s pissed like the rest of us.” He wasn’t lying down and had his running clothes on. I didn’t know if he was going for a run, or already had. He sighed. “You lied to him, and we had to lie to him for you.”
None of that had been my idea, but his parents’. I’d panicked after I started getting calls from both our parents after they all had realized I was missing. Dorian had been beside me in the car, and he would have known something was wrong if I didn’t appease our parents with some kind of explanation.
