AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jaroth clenched his jaw and didn’t say anything.
“What else did he do to her?” I asked.
When he didn’t respond again, Thayer grabbed him by his collar and thrust him against the wall. “What the fuck did he do to her? I know you fucking know. You’re still obsessed with her even though you two broke up. You know some shit.”
“You guys knew her before Sina’s father took her away,” Jaroth said, shoving Thayer back into a table. “You should’ve figured it out. As long as Sina has lived with her father, she’s never had freedom. What the fuck do you think happened to her mother?”
My chest tightened, my throat drying. Sina never talked about her mother. She had died when Sina was barely seven years old. Did that mean that … Sina had been taking her father’s abuse for that long? What had he been doing to her at that age?
“She was being abused for far longer than you know,” Jaroth continued. “It’s not my fucking place to talk about it. I don’t even know the extent of it all. You should ask Sina, and if she doesn’t want to tell you, that’s a fuckingyouproblem. It’s not mine.”
After one last hard shove, Jaroth pushed past us and walked toward the bar in the back, where there were a couple of succubi waiting for him. He slid onto one of the barstools, but didn’t even look in their direction.
Jaroth might not have been Sina’s mate, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care about her.
Only problem was that I wouldn’t let him get in the way again. He had come so close to Sina multiple times since she’d been back in Durnbone, and I knew he wouldn’t think twice about trying to sweep her off her feet and whisking her away from us.
Sina was ours.
38
the confession
sina
“So,uh, Gaian told me that we’re going to a Halloween party,” Darius said, lying next to me in his bed and staring up at the ceiling.
All night, after the guys went out without me, we had been chatting about everything under the damn sun, it seemed. And I … really loved it.
Why hadn’t we been this close four years ago? All I remembered was feeling so awkward around him and coming to him about problems with Calder. I never listened to any of his advice because I lost every train of thought around all of them. Reason had always gone out the window.
I inched closer to Darius and brushed my fingers against his. “Yeah, Maxine invited me.”
When the others were out, Darius usually left me alone and gave me space to myself because Calder and Thayer didn’t know the definition of personal space, apparently. But tonight, I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be with someone.
I could think of nothing but what Jaroth had told me the other night—that Dad was close.
My stomach turned, my fears eating away at my insides. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew it was. Jaroth might’ve wanted to get back together with me, but he knew that I would never consider dating him again. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t still care.
Deep down, he was a good person. Or at least, he tried to be.
Shifting around on the bed because it was getting a bit warm in here, I moved closer to Darius, finding myself cooler around him when our skin touched. And before I knew it, I’d laid my entire body on his, straddling his waist with my head on his chest.
Heat wasn’t as bad as it had been last night. Just these little touches felt good.
When we fell silent and the thoughts of Dad became too much, I lifted my head off his chest and looked him right in the eyes. “I need to tell you something. I wanted to wait until the others were here, but it’s too much sometimes with Calder.”
“Calder can be a bitch,” Darius joked and sent me a small smile. “What is it?”
“About my father,” I said, my voice strained and my entire body going rigid.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Darius whispered, brushing some hair out of my face.
“I need to,” I whispered, clutching on to him tighter. “I need to tell you to protect you all.”
Instead of pushing me—like Calder or Thayer would—he didn’t say a single word and instead pulled me against his chest and moved his fingers back and forth across my hips. I sank deeper into him, deciding to put all my trust in him.
If I fell back into a nightmare or was going to live through hell again, just to get what had happened out into the world, then he would be there to hold me. He would be there to help me. I wasn’t alone anymore. They weren’t going to hurt me.
