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“I thought she would be safer away from me!” she protested.
“Now? Or then?”
“Then,” she said.
“She needed you,” Stellan’s intense eyes blazed into hers. “And I think you know damn well she wasn’t really going to be safer. You should have protected her.”
“I couldn’t protect her! But once I was on my own, I did what I could. I became a hacker just so I could keep an eye on her–”
“Keep an eye on her?” I cut in sharply.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “To help her if she needed me. I did help her!”
“But you didn’t tell her who you really were.”
Nina let out a shaky laugh, then gestured around at the bars. “I don’t know why you’re so focused on this here. All that matters is getting out of here before the Demon peels all our skin off.”
Pax let out a growl. I’d bet it hurt him that his mother had been taken from him, and Aurora’s mother had walked off herself. My father had slowly destroyed my mother, but I still wish she’d found a way to fight for me.
“Why did you really go?” I demanded. “It wasn’t to protect Aurora. That’s enough of that bullshit excuse.”
Maybe it was better if Aurora believed it, but it wasn’t true.
“Because I was scared of her!” she exploded.
Rage tightened my chest, but I glanced at Stellan to gauge his reaction. He had been the one who forced Aurora into our lives, our house, because he thought she was a monster.
I could usually read Stellan pretty well, but the tousle-haired pretty boy had a stoic look on his face that could’ve competed with Cain’s. It gave nothing away.
“Explain,” Pax said tightly.
“Start at the beginning,” I overrode him. “How did you meet the Demon?”
Pax glared at me. “I’d be pissed at you interrupting me, but I guess you are the genius.”
It was nice Pax trusted me, but I didn’t exactly feel brilliant crouched in a dog cage.
“You know, the Demon is going to torture us all,” she said, with a hint of attitude that reminded me of Aurora. “You don’t need to do his work for him.”
“Just tell us.” Stellan demanded, and she looked at him like she saw something on his face that got her talking.
“I was young when I met him,” she said. “He was a regular at the bar where I was working. Of course, knowing him, now I realize he was hunting. He would never drink, and he secretly must have hated the atmosphere at the bar—he doesn’t like cursing or sexual behavior, especially from women.”
“Such a fun guy,” I said dryly.
“I didn’t see that then,” she said. “He was polite, even charming, when I talked to him, but he never initiated conversation. I was nineteen, I had a shitty boyfriend that I lived with and parents who were zero help when he started hitting me. He put me in the hospital, I begged them to help me, and they said I’d made my bed. I had nowhere to go.”
“Then I went to work, and he came over to the bar for the first time. He told me he had missed me. I was flattered—all the waitstaff had a crush on him, he was so good-looking—and then he saw the bruises. He asked me if I needed help, and I almost started crying.” A faraway look had come into her eyes, as if she was reliving that time.
“I said I didn’t need help. But at the end of the night, I realized he’d signed a thousand-dollar tip onto his bill. I thought it was a mistake that would get bounced back by the credit card company, so I ran after him. It was raining and he was walking across the parking lot, and when I called his name, he turned around. He told me it was no mistake, and then he touched my bruised face—so gently—and asked me again if I needed help. Really.”
“I told himyou don’t know me, and he said I know you enough to know you deserve to be safe and loved. I hadn’t known how much I needed to hear someone say that until then.”
“He helped me move out of my apartment and into a new place. He was with me when I got my stuff, and my ex-boyfriend tried to insult me, and he was so calm but clever and cutting. I hadn’t had anyone to protect me.”
“Of course, now I know it was all a trap. In the long run, we got married—”
“What happened to your ex-boyfriend? Dead?”
