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“It’s not.”
She beams up at me and lifts her head just as I lower mine. Our lips sear together in a kiss, and the roaring in my head goes silent once again.
I could honestly get used to this.
“Don’t disappear on me or anything.”
She chews on her lip, grinning impishly at me. “I’ll try not to.”
Outside on the street, I take in a slow lungful of crisp morning air. I’m about to get into the waiting car when my phone rings. It’s Christian, who’s been at the hospital where they took Allison after the bullets that came through her window almost killed her.
“Mr. Drakos.”
“Talk to me.”
“She’s out of surgery, sir. Doctors seem to think she’s going to pull through. And she might be awake within the next few hours.”
“Good.”
It’s not “good” because I give the least shit whether the woman who lied to Dahlia in order to get close to her, and then almost tried to kill her, lives or dies.
Actually, let me rephrase: shecandie, and I’ll be perfectly fine with that.
But she doesn’t get to do that until I’ve talked with her and pried out what exactly she was about to say before someone tried to kill her. I don’t think Allison Whitley is the only threat here. And I’mverycurious what she was about to tell Dahlia about her stepfather.
“Keep me posted about everything.”
“Will do, sir.”
I slip into the back of my car.
It’s time to chase down the last of Dahlia’s demons.
And destroy them once and for all.
36
DAHLIA
I usedto love puzzles as a kid. Crosswords, jigsaws, word jumbles—I couldn’t get enough of them. My Aunt Celeste in particular used to love watching me do them and then howl with laughter when I’d figure them out in no time at all.
My favorite was always the mysteries that came in those little paperback books they sold in the checkout lines of grocery stores. Most of them involved incredibly tame “crimes”, things like the mystery of who stole Mrs. Twiddledee’s apple pie from the window where it was cooling, or where Sally Squirrel—who was,obviously, a talking squirrel wearing odd Victorian-era petticoats and dresses—misplaced her sewing kit.
You’d read over the short, illustrated stories and look for clues in both the text and the drawings. And Ilovedthem.
For some reason, I keep thinking about those books as I stare at the jumble of legal paperwork and documents on the kitchen island in front of me. It’s all the motions and filings that Gerard’s been hitting my mom with. And I know it should be cut and dried: she was wooed into marrying a jackal of a man who then used her trust to come after hersignificantfinancial assets. But it’s not adding up to me. Something seems off.
It helps that all the cards are on the table now. Last night, in his arms, Deimos and I told each othereverything.
I told him how I’d always wished the author of the diary was him, even after Chase found it too and used lines from it to make me thinkhewas the author. I hate so much that it worked: that I was so eager and desperate to meet my mysterious pen pal that when Chase used Deimos’ words in order to elude that it washisdiary, I jumped on it.
But now I know the truth that I wanted all along.
Deimos even told me about Chase and Brad, and what happened in that room before I walked in.
I told him how at times over the last six years, when considering if I was doomed never to find a relationship, I’d think about him, a lot. And wonder what things would have been like if I’d realized it really was him I’d been pouring my fantasies out to within the pages of that book.
He told me, quite frankly and unapologetically, that he’d quietly sabotaged any possible relationship I might have found after leaving Knightsblood.
