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Chapter thirty-six
Daphne
“Thisisstupid.”
Penelope laughed, smiling at me in the mirror from where she stood behind me, pinning up the last of my curls.
“I don’t think it’s stupid at all,” she insisted, stepping back to admire her work. “It’s been a stressful few weeks, and I think a party is exactly what we need to take our minds off of, um, things.”
The things Penelope was referring to were the fact that my sister had been carted out of the hotel in handcuffs and was currently being held in a psychiatric facility for evaluation. After an assessment, they would be determining if she is fit to stand trial, which I had some mixed feelings about.
On the one hand, what Constance did was absolutely wrong, and I hated that she was the reason Penelope and I had been in danger on more than one occasion.
On the other hand, she was my sister, and no matter the bad blood between us, I didn’t like to see her suffering.
But I knew Stone would not back down on this, and I didn’t blame him; with his wife having been in danger and a baby on the way, he was taking no chances.
Now that three of the four men who were involved in my kidnapping were dead, I was ready to put the whole thing behind me and move on. I had no idea where Duke had ended up, but neither Silas nor I were worried about him coming after me. It appeared it was all over.
That didn’t stop the nightmares, though.
I had been seeing a counselor, but so far, nothing seemed to help.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true.
Silas was there, by my side every day and night. He’d held me through more than one panic attack in the middle of the night, and knowing he’d experienced the same sort of thing, had dealt with how own nightmares, seemed to ease my mind and help me sleep.
So, yes, all in all, it had been an exhausting few weeks.
Which was yet another reason why this graduation party should have been canceled. However, my mother would not hear of it. To her, image was everything, and she was not about to let something as insignificant as her own daughter hiring kidnappers and pulling a gun on an innocent woman tarnish her ability to host a glamorous event.
So here I stood, all dressed up and ready to show all of New York Society that nothing will stop a Pennington woman from throwing the best party in town.
Even if something really, really should.
Spinning around, I placed my hands on my hips and frowned.
“Taking our mind off things is one thing, Penelope. Hosting a freaking ball is something else entirely.”
“I know, but try to have fun, alright?” she asked, reaching for my hand and giving my fingers a soft squeeze. “Stone and I are heading back to Vegas tomorrow, so let’s enjoy our time together.”
I smiled at her, knowing she was right. I only had a few hours before they left, and I was going to miss them so much.
Thinking about them leaving made my mind drift to the one subject I had been avoiding; Silas and I.
I knew Silas had a job and a life to get back to, but in all the nights we laid together since everything had happened, and all the things we had talked about, neither of us had broached the subject of the future.
Right now, I felt like we were in a bubble, and one wrong move—one wrong word—and it would all just disappear.
Again.
Penelope chatted animatedly as the elevator descended, taking us to the ground floor where the ballroom was located, and I tried to smile and nod in all the right places, but my heart was racing like I’d just run a mile. I placed my palm over my heart, taking slow breaths to try and calm myself before I had to face a horde of my mother’s so-called friends.
But when the elevator doors opened, the face that greeted us was completely unexpected.
“Xander!”
His smile was slow and hesitant, meeting my eyes for only a moment before looking away again. He seemed to be scanning the hotel lobby, his gaze darting from one spot to the next and then back again, and I finally understood.
Silas and I had visited Xander in the hospital as he recovered from the gunshot wound Davis had delivered, and I had gotten to know him a bit. He was a veteran, just like Silas, but he was struggling with being back home, and had found that being alone in the woods was the easiest place for him. My heart hurt, thinking of him out there in the forest, hidden away from the world that refused to try to understand him, but Silas said that there were lots of men and women like him, ones who had returned from their tours different than how they had left, and that going back to how they lived their lives before just wasn’t possible.
Knowing what I did now, I stepped close to him, but didn’t touch him, waiting for him to look at me again before I spoke.
“How are you feeling today?”
“Better, thanks,” was all he said, but I could see that he was moving better than the last time I had seen him. The bullet had struck him in on the left, just above his hip. I guess he had tried to dive out of the way, and that meant the shot had just grazed him, missing anything truly vital. After Davis had dragged me away from Xander’s camp, Xander had managed to stand, making his way through the woods to the nearest trail, where he had just happened to come across Silas’s friend, Hawthorn. The two of them had called the ambulance from the parking lot, and that was how we had found them when Silas and I arrived.
The whole thing was pretty fantastical and would probably make for a decent movie of the week, but I was just glad it was all over.
“Will you be joining us for the party?” Penelope asked.
Xander turned his head, glancing at the open doors to the ballroom where guests were already milling about, drinks in hand, and he shrugged.
“It’s not really my scene,”
“It’s not ours, either,” Penelope joked. “But we are going to put on our best fake smiles and pretend for a few hours.”
When Xander still didn’t speak, I said, “You are welcome to come, Xander. I’d like it if you would. I certainly owe you more than a drink.”
Shaking his head, Xander frowned. “Don’t owe me nothin’, girl. Nothin’ at all.”
“Well, still. You have my thanks, and anything else I can offer is yours, too.”
