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“No!” She plasters herself against the door.
“Move, Monique,” I say it as calmly as I possibly can. I won’t hurt her any more than she’s already been hurt tonight. But I will find that fucker and kill him.
Fuck that, I will take joy in feeling the life leave his body with my hands wrapped around his throat. Let’s find out how much he likes being strangled.
“No. I can’t,” she says. “You can’t leave me. Please.”
Her words wrap around my heart, softening it. Only she could soften me up in my current state of mind. But still …
“I’ll be back. You’re safe here. No one is going to bother you here.”
“Diego, no. Don’t go.” She pushes me away from the door.
I barely budge.
I reach for the door handle around her body and pull the door open. “I’ll be right back,” I lie. The kind of torture I have planned for that bastard will take at least all night.
“Please, don’t leave me,” she pleads at the same time she throws her arms around my waist, holding me tight. Her head fits against my chest perfectly.
My instinct tells me to push her away and go find that sorry son of a bitch and make him pay. But the way she’s clinging to me, I can’t rip myself away from her.
“You can’t leave,” she starts to say. “You’ll kill him if you leave this room. I know it. And then you’ll get into trouble.”
“Nothing will happen to me.”
“Yes it will. Bad things always happen to the people I love because of me.” She starts to cry into my chest. “Please don’t go. You’ll get in trouble and then everyone will find out. My dad will be pissed and will hurt him, too. Then he’ll be sent to jail, too. Please just stay with me.”
Her arms tighten around my waist.
I stand there, stiff as a board for what feels like forever. I want nothing more than to rip that cocksucker’s head off and spit down his throat. But I can’t leave her like this. I can hear the terror in her voice.
Slowly, my grip loosens on the doorknob, and I close the door. I lead her over to the bed to sit. And still, she doesn’t let go of me.
“You’ll stay?”
“Yes.” I wrap my arms around her and kick off my shoes. I bring us to lay on the bed, her closet to the wall, me on the outside. “I’ll stay.”
Her shoulders relax. The hold she has on my arm loosens, but she doesn’t let go.
“It’s my fault,” she whispers.
My head instantly pops up from the pillow. “Monique, I just agreed to stay, but if you say that one more time, I can’t keep my promise. I already want to kill him because he put his hands on you. If that bastard has made you believe it’s your fault, I can’t let him continue to breathe another night.”
She goes quiet.
I relax against the pillow again, but tension still flows through me. I’m only remaining here because I know it would hurt her if I left. That’s the last thing I want to do. Even as I lay here, I’m envisioning my hands wrapped around his throat.
But I won’t strangle the fucker at first. No. That would be too easy a death. He’ll have to feel pain first. Lots of pain.
“He didn’t, um …” Her voice trembles. “I fought him off,” she finally says. “Barely, but I did.” She hiccups right before burying her face into the crook of her arm. The sobs that wrack her body rip my heart right out of my chest.
I pull her into my body and kiss her temple, whispering in her ear that she’s safe. That nothing will happen to her here. Most important, nothing she could’ve done warranted what he did.
“I should’ve listened to you,” she says after a while. “You were right about him. About the others, too …”
Cullen and her ex, Derek, weren’t the only guys she’s dated that I warned her about. They were the worst, though. But even that fucker Slater never put his hands on her. She never ended up in my dorm room with tears in her eyes and red marks around her fucking neck because of what he did.
“It’s not your fault,” I say to her because even though she’s not saying it, I can hear in her voice that she believes it is. “Everyone dates people they end up regretting. Making a mistake in a boyfriend doesn’t mean you deserve whatever he does to you. You know that, right?”
