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She was nineteen years old and moderately happy, she supposed, but there was always something empty inside her.
Sure, she had things going for her. Her parents were respected members of the community. She was in college. The guy, Eric Jacobs, who was in med school and whom everyone and their mother thought she should be dating, didn’t push her when she needed more time before she committed to a relationship with him.
She had been at a celebratory dinner with four of her friends that night, all at a high-end restaurant. She couldn’t remember what they were celebrating anymore.
She did remember laughing and having a good time until she excused herself to go to the bathroom.
It had happened so suddenly.
The most horrific event of her life.
She had heard the shots being fired from the bathroom. The screams. Her first instinct was to save her friends. She didn’t think about anything else. Rigid with fear but determined not to hide in the bathroom while her friends could be injured, or worse, she opened the door that led into the restaurant. Within the space of a second, she caught sight of the four men with guns in their hands.
But the only thing she remembered after that was an explosion of gunfire that shattered her eardrums before a tall, muscular body threw itself at her, covering her body with his, saving her life.
She had been vaguely aware of being carried out through the kitchen of the restaurant and into the sunlight before she lost consciousness again.
When she woke up, she found herself in a strange room.
She couldn’t tell if it had been hours or days that had passed. Her wounds, where shards of glass had scraped deeply against her skin, were neatly dressed in bandages.
She wore a men's clean white shirt, and her hair had been brushed and braided. Immediately, she remembered the shootout at the restaurant. But that didn’t explain why she was here in a place she didn’t recognize at all.
When she tried the door, it opened instantly, and there he stood. The man who had saved her life. Yet also kidnapped her.
From the bandage around his torso, he had been shot in the process of protecting her. But when she looked up at his tall frame to search out his features, she found him wearing a ski mask. And with his head bent, she had no idea who he was, not when he was further concealed with the hood of a jacket.
But something about him felt familiar, as if she had felt his presence before, but that hardly made any sense.
She begged him to tell her who he was. She wanted to know him. She begged him to let her go because her parents would be worried, and that ruined her completely.
Night after night, her thoughts had been consumed by the stranger who said nothing to her, kept his distance, but also kept her clean, fed, and medically attended to.
He answered none of her questions, and sometimes she would just talk to keep herself from going mad. And when she stopped, he would grunt at her to continue.
As the days went by and she grew stronger, she started to remember the night at the restaurant. He hadn’t been a guest. She would have remembered seeing someone as tall as him. Was he one of the shooters? Why did he save her then?
He kept her for twenty-one nights, and then he blindfolded her, carried her into a car, and drove her home. He broke into her bedroom and laid her down on her bed.
As he did so, he lowered his face to hers. His lips touched hers. She sighed, and for one glorious moment, his tongue swept into her mouth as he kissed her before he was gone.
She tried to run after him, determined to cut off the blindfold she still wore. By then, it had been too late. He was gone.
She hadn’t seen him again. Not once. And she never told anyone anything about him either. Her story remained the same. She didn’t know who took her or why. She couldn’t recognize them and didn't have any other information about them.
He was her secret.
What she did learn was that the hit had been carried out by rival mobs. When the police came by to question her about the shooters and then brought her in to identify them, she was taken to a morgue. All that remained were their heads, and she recognized each one of them. Their heads were dropped off at the police station just the day before.
Somehow, she knew he had done that. He had killed those men to keep her safe because she was a witness to their crime. He had kept their faces intact for that reason alone.
Declan.
Still, she never told anyone about the man who had saved her. Not even Ellie, and somehow her whole life became fixated on him.
On his kiss.
She knew it was unhealthy, especially if she was never going to see him again.
