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I check the time, push my chair back, and stand. “Ask your uncle when you see him. I’ll make sure he tells you the truth. We leave in forty-five minutes.” I go to walk away, but then pause and turn around to face her. “Unless you want to stay here. I’m sure my father would love the company.”
Her eyes go wide, and she shakes her head.
I nod, walking back toward her. “One thing, though, if you do join me, I expect to finish what we started last night.”
“What?”
“Be downstairs in forty-five minutes, Cristina. You have a big day ahead of you.”20DamianCristina’s still a little pale when, forty-five minutes later, I open the front doors and escort her out to the waiting SUV.
I watch her as she takes in the surroundings, the dense forest as far as the eye can see, the only breaks in the trees that of the mountain straddling and zig-zagging through the property.
“Is that a guard tower?” she asks as my entourage pulls out. One SUV in front. One behind.
“Yes.”
Her eyes follow it as the driver takes the curve leading onto the mile-long road to the border of the property and twists in her seat to look back at the house.
“How old is it?”
“It was built over four centuries ago. The land has been in my family for longer.”
She looks at me. “Where is this place exactly?”
“Upstate New York. We have property in several cities, but this is where my father wants to be.”
“Where do you want to be?”
Her question catches me off guard. “It doesn’t matter what I want,” is the answer I give her.
The truth? Anywhere my father isn’t.
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t,” she says flippantly, shifting her gaze back out the window. “Just curious.”
Using my own words against me. I smile. Reaching out, I touch her hair.
She jumps. Spins around to look at me and backs up against the door.
“We’ll get it fixed when we’re in the city.”
She reaches up to touch her hair where I just had. “It’s fine.”
“It’s crooked. You did it yourself?”
“Liam did it.”
“I’m surprised he thought it would work.”
“We were desperate, Damian.”
“He put his own life in danger to help you.”
She studies me like my comment is a strange one. “I’d do the same for him.”
“You’re not even closely related. Just cousins.”
“You don’t have to be related at all to care about someone.”
I’m taken aback by this. I shift my gaze out the window. What happens if even your own family doesn’t care about you? Doesn’t love you? Doesn’t that make you unworthy? Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with you when your own blood won’t love you?
“But I’m sure you don’t know anything about that,” she continues.
I shove my thoughts aside. “About what?” I ask, looking back at her.
“Love.” Her expression changes when she says the word.
“Love,” I repeat, wanting to feel it on my tongue. “No, I guess I don’t.”
I feel her staring at me as I continue to scroll on my phone. I’m not reading, though. Her observation has thrown me off-kilter.
“Do you remember it?” she asks after a long minute of silence.
“Remember what?” I shift my gaze back to her.
“The accident.”
I nod.
“I think I only remember because I keep dreaming it.”
“Tell me the dream.”
Her eyes search mine before she shifts her gaze out the window. “My parents are arguing. No, fighting, really fighting. Screaming at each other. Scott reaches over to squeeze my hand, and I drop what I’m holding. That’s why he isn’t wearing his seat belt. He’s going to get it for me.”
I wait when she goes silent, shifts her gaze down to her hands in her lap where she’s worrying a cuticle.
“I keep seeing his face right as it happened. Maybe right before. Like he knows what’s coming. And that it’s bad. That part’s real, I think. And I will never forget how he looked at me.”
She turns to me, eyelashes damp. “I never found it anyway.”
“The thing you dropped?”
She nods.
“What was it?”
“A rock.”
I must look confused.
“He died for a rock. For my stupid rock.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
She snorts, attention back on her hands. Once she’s got herself under control, she turns back to me. “No, it was my dad’s fault. Isn’t that what you said? Why you killed him?”
“He was driving drunk.”
She doesn’t defend him.
“I remember when they lifted you out of the car. You were crying, but I didn’t get the impression it was from pain.”
“You saw me?”
“Just for a minute. Before the explosion. The fire.”
“God.”
I look down at my hand, knowing that I was the lucky one.
“I saw armed guards outside the house the other night. Armed with automatic rifles,” she says.
I glance her way again, grateful for the change of subject. “And?”
“You need that kind of protection? In that fortress?”
“My line of work is dangerous.”
