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“Christ…” I muttered, rubbing my free hand over my face. “What did Dad say?”
Lavena blinked up at me. “What do you think he said?”
“Nothing,” we both replied in unison.
“He keeps letting her buy all these clothing stores. She’s seriously collecting them the way some women collect diamonds. She owns like thirty of them. It’s insane.”
Lavena continued to chatter away, going over all the things I’d missed while guiding me down to the main floor.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked when we hit the foyer.
“Kitchen,” she stated simply. “I’m hungry and it’s supper time, and I’m not letting you out of my sights.”
CHAPTER 3
Kamari
Icouldn’t focus.
The evening crept in, folding the night like a warm blanket around me and I barely noticed beyond the fact that someone had lit a fire in the pit and shadows lurked just outside the golden halo.
I told myself I needed to snap out of it. I was being too obvious. The others would notice and ask questions I couldn’t answer because I had no answers. I had no idea what happened or where I went wrong. The lake of euphoria I’d been floating in at the sight of Darius standing in the foyer was destroyed by everything else that immediately followed.
How had I been so wrong? How had I allowed myself to create such a world of fantasy and deluded myself into believing it to be fact? Was I honestly so pathetic?
Swallowing back the hot surge of heartbreak bubbling up in my throat, I forced myself to focus on anything that wasn’t Darius Medlock.
“Well, you can’t honestly expect anyone to understand something so intricate when they’ve never seen such a thing before,” Sasha was saying when my attention moved past theroaring fire to where the other woman sat on the wide U-shaped bench making up the outer walls of the in-ground patio.
“But why would you do that?” Kas leaned forward, resting her palms on her knees. “If you don’t know, don’t touch it.”
“Curiosity.” Sasha’s shoulder went up in a bump. “How else will we know what life was like back in the day?”
“Do you honestly think that makes it okay? You’re literally grave robbing.”
“She’s not wrong,” Lavena piped in, kicking off her sandals and pulling the ankle of her left leg under her. “You can’t just go into another country and steal their stuff. They call it studying culture to cover up for theft.”
“I’m not saying steal things. I’m saying, for historical purposes, it should be okay to study the graves without taking anything.”
“But people are assholes and stealing is what they do,” Lavena finished, leaning back. “Half the museums in the world are guilty of this, which is why I don’t feel bad when people like Florence helps liberate certain pieces back to their countries.”
“Florence!” Kas gasped, clapping her hands together once and turning to Sasha. “How is your aunt?”
Sasha shrugged. “Fine, I think. I got an email from her a month or so back. She was in Morocco.”
“We should go to Morocco,” Lavena sighed, closing her eyes and tilting her face up to the evening sky.
The fire popped and a wet log squealed. The others continued their chatter, flowing from topic to topic with no effort. I tried really hard to calm the voices asking why. I tried contributing but I could find nothing to add. So, I sat still and listened to the dragonflies skipping over the lake, the frog plopping into the water, the crickets in the grass. The world around the lodge was turning in for the evening, curling up to rest while the predators stretched and unfurled from their holes. I considered turningin and hiding under my blankets until the hurt stopped, but I knew it couldn’t be so easy. Eventually, dawn would come and he would be there in my space, taking up my air, my sanity. I couldn’t escape him, not in four years, not in three days, not ever. He was a tattoo etched across my heart, permanent and painful.
“Darius.”
I jumped at the sound of his name slicing through time and space. The wicker armrest squeaked under the unexpected clench of my fingers as my body reflexively flinched, teetering between needing to bolt and hide.
But the winding path to the house glinted in the dusk, pale and empty, absent of the devil.
My gaze swung to Lavena, confusion twinning with the mini panic attack that had my heart pattering a bit too fast. She was laughing at something Kas was saying. It took a few tries before I could hone in on the conversation.
“So, my dad says to Alexander, I can’t just request his own cell and Alexander says, then buy the prison.”
