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“Then there was Juliette Belfort. She showed up at the station a couple of days after you were discharged from the hospital.”
My eyebrows crinkled. Mrs. Belfort and I weren’t even close before The Incident. It was after what happened to me that I’d started hanging out with her. Before, I’d been the half-assed girl who visited her once a month or so, bringing whatever pie Hannah had made that day and sharing a piece with her, along with lemonade, in front of the maze, just to take some of her loneliness away.
“Mrs. Belfort had a lot to say about Darren and Pamela Morgansen. Especially the latter. Mrs. Belfort blamed her for not being around for you. Said that you’d kind of raised yourself since you’d moved into El Dorado, spending excessive time in her maze and by your window. Things added up, but you and your parents were cagey. Over the years, I thought about you a lot. I wanted to check in on you many, many times. But I knew it wouldn’t be constructive for you. Knew that your parents were always going to guard you with their common yet mistaken belief that what had happened that night could ruin their business, stain their reputations, and affect your status forever.”
We hugged after that, long and tight, like old friends that had missed each other. She wasn’t a friend, but I had missed her. Before I walked away, I asked her, “What do you make of Darren? He raped me, but he also unleashed the plastic bag after his death.”
“I think…” Villegas said carefully, rubbing her chin. “I think Darren was unbalanced. The writing was on the wall, but your mother didn’t want to read it. There was too much at stake. Keep your phone turned on.”
“You got it.”
When I walked out of the police station, I could feel Emery, Nolan, and Henry’s presence in the air. It sounded crazy, but I could. It smelled of danger and the sour copper of my blood the night they’d tried to kill the old Jesse. For a while there, I thought they’d succeeded. The universe felt limitless all of a sudden. Big and wide in an unthreatening, the-world-is-my-oyster way.
I missed Bane like a limb, but also wanted to punch him in the nuts. He’d betrayed me, before and after he knew me. Slept with me with the knowledge he was being paid. And yet, I knew he wasn’t the villain in my screwed-up story.
Artem, Dad, had given us each other, in the most unexpected way, and now I’d let Roman go. Only it seemed unfair that I’d have to give up someone who’d made me so happy, just because of one mistake. I thought about the piled-up stack of mistakes and wrongdoings Artem had collected over the years, some of them behind our backs.
Bane wasn’t perfect.
But he wasn’t evil.
He deserved a chance.
I drove up to El Dorado. I promised myself I wasn’t going to walk into the party and make a scene, but I wanted to know if my gut feeling was right. I parked a street away from Wren’s house, pulled my hoodie up to cover the majority of my face, and walked down her street toward her house. I wasn’t looking for Emery’s Volvo SUV or Nolan’s Ferrari. I was looking for an old beatdown red truck or a Harley.
When I found the red ugly thing sitting right in front of the huge floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the street, from which partygoers drank and laughed, I grinned to myself. Flippantly, I circled his truck from behind, unlocked the passenger door, and slipped in. He turned around from watching the party and almost punched my face on an instinct, before realizing who it was.
I tapped my chin thoughtfully, dragging my eyes over his beautiful face. “Hmm. Aggressive much?”
“Excuse me, Miss, did you lose your way to Hot Topic?” His eyes swept over my attire, and it occurred to me that Bane had never done this before. Teased me for my weird clothing. His corded muscles relaxed. I gulped. Roman ‘Bane’ Protsenko was beautiful like a Pushkin paragraph. You could read his face a thousand times, and each time, you’d find something new to admire.
“What are you doing here?” I squeezed his bicep. I already knew the answer, but wanted to hear it anyway.
He looked away, cracking his gum loudly. “Figured you were gonna show up here. I respect that you wanna do this alone, but I can’t justify these two gloriously big balls if I’m not man enough at least to give you backup.” He cupped his groin, a dark zing igniting in his eyes. “Know what? Fuck it. It’s not about you. I know you don’t need backup. I came here because I was worried, and I wanted to put my mind at ease. Are you mad?”
