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“Trust me, having sex with a stranger is not on the list of things I’ll regret,” I whispered back. Not being there to save Father Charlie, not taking back my life sooner—those were two things on the list. Hell, not pushing back at my father three years ago and telling him I wouldn’t sell myself out all because he’d promised me to someone for the night was numero uno on the fucking list.
But, again, Zander wouldn’t understand. He worked for my father, held him in the highest regard. He knew exactly what my father was capable of. He respected my father—and he wasn’t the only one. No one knew how deep my father’s ambitions went, no one knew just what he would do in order to reach those goals.
Except me, of course.
Zander didn’t say much else as he drove me home. He didn’t say a single word more as he helped me carry up the bags of newly-bought clothes upstairs, depositing them just outside my room. We made sure to make enough noise to alert my father that we were back home. All the while, Zander hardly looked at me. Whether he was jealous or pissed at me for what I’d chosen to do, I didn’t care. It was my life. I had the right to make certain decisions, and if I wanted to sleep with random strangers every night, then I would.
That night, as I lay in my bed, trying to sleep, I thought about the man with the dragon tattoo. I thought about how his body had felt, how he’d moved, how expertly he’d made me shake with pleasure. I thought about the things he’d told me, how he’d reacted when he’d discovered my age. I didn’t know what to make of him, but I knew if he hadn’t approached me, I never would’ve had the balls to do it myself, so in that way, I was grateful.
When sleep came, it was a dreamless sleep. I considered that a win. The nights when I was not thrown into nightmares of my past, of my failures, were always wins in my book. They came few and far between. You’d think me being Miguel Santos’s daughter would mean I had a stone-cold heart, that I didn’t care about anything—and maybe that was true, to a certain extent. Maybe I had these… moods, let’s just call them, where something in me snapped.
But everyone had those moments. The key to finding them was knowing how hard to push someone. When you were pushed to the breaking point, killing was as easy as breathing. It came naturally. The fight or flight response everyone always talked about. Taught from an early age how to kill, it was obvious which one I’d land on.
Never run. Running was a coward’s choice. Always fight, even if you sometimes lost.
