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In a flash, the Vigilante spun me around and put his hand over my mouth, muffling my cries as his other arm clenched around my stomach and lifted me a foot from the ground. Despite my kicking and thrashing, he pulled me to the door and released his grip over my mouth long enough to swing it open.
To his credit, my bodyguard acted swiftly. It took him a second for his widened eyes to take in the scene before him and to launch forward, but the Vigilante was expecting it, shoving me off of him and into the chest of my security detail.
My bodyguard caught me, wrapping his arms around me as the Vigilante fled faster than an Olympic sprinter.
“Are you okay?” my bodyguard asked.
“Yes.”
He looked like he wanted to run after the Vigilante, but doing so meant leaving me alone, exposed and vulnerable, should this be a ruse to lure the bodyguard away.
As sirens wailed in the distance, the Vigilante vanished into the city.
Leaving me with more questions than ever.
CHAPTER42
Luna
Do I know you?
The thought echoed through my mind, haunting me, eating at me like a cancerous growth devouring everything in its path. Because the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that the Vigilante was somebody I knew. Why else would he be so intent on protecting me?
“You’re fired,” Hunter snapped.
We were standing in his great room, where Hunter had angrily intercepted me and my bodyguard after we’d come home. I knew seeing Hunter for the first time since he’d heard about the bathroom incident would be hard, but he looked even more frazzled than I’d expected.
His suit normally made him look controlled and calm, but he’d undone the top three buttons and yanked his tie down several inches, so it hung like a green noose around his neck. And he was pacing, glaring at the bodyguard like he was seriously considering punching him.
“Hunter,” I cautioned.
Hunter’s furious gaze pulled away from my bodyguard and slammed onto me.
“You could have been killed,” Hunter growled.
“I could’ve screamed,” I said, trying to give the bodyguard some credit. “I was trying to bide my time for the cops—”
“You should never have wound up in a room alone with anyone.” Hunter glowered at the bodyguard one last time. “Get out of my house.”
I offered the bodyguard a silent apology before he quietly ambled away.
“Don’t you think you should give him one more chance?” I asked.
“I won’t forgiveanymistakes when it comes to your safety, Luna.”
I didn’t have it in me to debate the bodyguard’s situation any further; I’d tried to reason with Hunter for the last ten minutes, and I could tell it was a lost cause.
Plus, I had bigger things on my mind right now. Namely, who was the Vigilante?
After what happened in the bathroom, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the truth of his identity was lurking just beneath the surface, taunting me, daring me to uncover who he really was. Nor could I shake the feeling that I did, in fact, know him. I mean, the guy had threatened to beat up a high school bully of mine, for crying out loud.
And if I did know him, that meant my already-fractured foundation might get rocked once more.
While I hadn’t let anyone fully into my heart since the betrayals in my past, the truth was, Ihadlet some people in—albeit in small doses. I trusted my father’s friend, Rodney, believed he had a good heart, and was, in fact, innocent of his charges. I trusted that he was the person he’d claimed to be to my father and that he wouldn’t break his heart like all the other people in his life. Rodney knew what my father had been through. Surely, he wouldn’t foster a friendship if, behind the scenes, he was a killer.
I trusted Sean a lot more than I’d understood until this moment. He was the first real friend I’d had since I was a kid, and I’d bled my heart out to him about my father’s case and the heartbreak it had caused. The whole time I’d been exposing my vulnerability, was he weaving a web of lies, meticulously designed to fool me?
And then there was Hunter. I hadn’t known him as long as I knew Sean, but my connection to him was profound. Was it possible that beneath the calm, caring man who was trying to protect me lurked a monster that slaughtered people in cold blood? A killer hiding behind the camouflage of an attorney sworn to uphold the law?
