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As I glanced back at their door, it opened. Rhett stepped out and quickly jogged over to me, pulling me inside no sooner than the elevator doors opened.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“Don’t give me that shit. You know what it’s about.”
He nodded, opting to be silent. We remained wordless until we made it back to the other side of campus and back in my dorm.
“Where’s Sky?” he asked, nervously glancing left to right.
“She’s gone,” I sadly replied, frowning. “She left a few days ago.”
“Oh.” Rhett offered me a heavy frown of his own. “I-I’m sorry. I bet that’s rough.”
“It is,” I nodded, “but she said she’d be back. That’s all I can hope for.”
He gave me a simple bob of his handsome head and stalked over to the sectional, sinking down. “So, what’s up?”
“I…” Pausing, I swallowed hard. “I need you to know that I’m not letting what happened go. More will come, I’m sure of it.”
He crinkled his brows at me. “And you know this, how?”
“I just do,” I replied, knowing deep down it wouldn’t be a good enough response. “The Outlaws are controlled by Damien Reyez. If he sent one of his men to kidnap a student, he’ll strike again, especially since you killed one of his men.”
Now he was glaring at me. “Again, you know this, how?”
I hadn’t realized I was pacing around the room until I’d noticed his eyes following my movement. I sighed, then choked down a swallow he couldn’t see before I crept over to the couch and sat.
“I’m from the Valley too,” I started, “I-I’m an orphan.”
His stiff gaze softened a little. “You are?”
“Well…” I froze, biting my bottom lip, “maybe not an orphan per say. Shit.” I grasped my head, panicking and feeling like an idiot. “I-I don’t know how to explain it.”
“It’s okay,” he promised, sounding worried for me, like he’d somehow understood what I was trying to tell him. “Just take your time.”
A lump lodged in my throat. I’d have to tell him my story. About what happened to me that night. The thought had me sick.
“My father abandoned me and my mom,” I rasped out, my voice cracking, “long ago, not long after my fifth birthday. I don’t know what happened to him, if he’s alive, nothing. I’ve been trying to find him for years now with no luck.”
“Wait, is that why you stopped by the other night?” he asked. “To ask Phantom’s help with trying to track down your father?”
“Uh, yeah…it was.”
“Oh, Samara.” Rhett scooted closer to me, another frown crossing his handsome face. “I’m so sorry.”
I nodded, though it wasn’t his sympathy I wanted. Then I shook my head, realizing we were getting off topic. “Anyway, when my dad left us, Mom struggled hard. She-She turned to drugs. Two to three months ago, maybe longer, I’d gotten a waitressing job. I worked hard, made good money each night, enough to save up to buy me a cheap car.”
I held back a sob as it all came rushing back to me. Flash after flash.
“We lived in a trailer park, inside Damien’s territory. Outlaw territory.” I paused again and wiped at my eyes. “I rode a bike to work. I came home this one night and my mother was doing drugs with some random fucking druggy she met. She said he was gonna live with us and I blew up. You see, I paid all the bills there. It wasmyjob that kept us afloat because Mom was too strung out to work after Dad left us. She found where I’d hidden all the money I saved up. She-She had drug debts. She took all my money to pay back what she owed.”
“Fuck,” Rhett breathed out.
“When I went to confront her, I found the guy she was doing drugs with dead in my living room. His throat was slit ear to ear. I-I found my mom held at gunpoint by a man in a mask. There were two holes cut out for the eyes and one to the mouth, just like the guy who’d tried to kidnap Sky that night.”
