Love the Way You Lie (Stripped 1)

I run.

* * *

So much for eighteen years of ballet lessons and long hours spent on the pole. He is old, but he is a born hunter. All I want is to get away. I run toward the Grand. Strange—I shouldn’t feel safe there. But I do. He must have anticipated it, because he cuts me off in an alley.

A hand on my wrist, clamping down hard. “Honor!”

That hand had tucked me into bed. It had rested on my head while my fiancé fucked me over the desk.

That hand had killed my mother.

I’m holding the Taser but he’s got my wrist. He squeezes—hard—and my grip loosens. The Taser clatters to the ground. My father kicks it into a pile of trash bags. Disappeared into the shadows and muck.

“Be still,” he snaps.

“Did you take her?” I demand. I twist away, but I can’t get free. “Did you take Clara?”

“She wasn’t there. The room is empty.”

I don’t even know if I believe him. “Let me go. Just let me go.”

Even though there’s nowhere for me to go anymore. Not after the motel room has been found out and violated. I can only hope he’s telling the truth about Clara being gone before he got there. Did she get some idea that they were on to us? Is that why she left, when she always swore she’d wait for me?

He wrests me back—and down. I fall onto the concrete, knees scraped in a blinding flash of pain. It’s like going onstage. He leans over me, breathing hard, eyes wild. “Why did you leave?” he demands.

I laugh and shudder at the same time. The result is a broken sound. A cry. “You know.”

“I didn’t care if your sister was gone, but you—”

“And that’s why I had to go. Because you didn’t care about her.” I wrench my hand away, but I’m kneeling now. I’m lost. We’re in the middle of the sidewalk in the shitty part of town, but no one will interfere. No one would lift a hand to protect me. “You didn’t care about me either. Not when you gave me to Byron.”

His face is twisted in rage. Or guilt? “You should have come to me.”

I laugh. Maybe it’s the wrong thing to do in this moment. Lord knows I would never have laughed in my father’s face back home, in the mansion, running across Aubusson rugs in my ballet slippers as if they could somehow transport me somewhere else.

We aren’t in the mansion anymore. The ballet slippers did take me somewhere else. They gave me a way to support us as we ran. “You saw, Daddy.” I’m bitter. And too tired to lie. “You saw what he did to me and patted my head. Like I was a pet.”

“You are my daughter,” he shouts, and the way he says it, it means the same thing.

“No, you’re right,” I say, sarcastic now. “I’m sure you would have protected me if I’d asked you to. You’d have protected me the same way you did my mother.”

He grows still. His eyes narrow, and for the first time since he’s caught me, real fear slices through me. Even in the depths of my sorrow, my sister gone and my lover’s betrayal, I don’t want to die.

“What of Portia? I did not beat her.”

“And that’s the gold standard, is that right? What about a gun, did you shoot her? Or a knife—did you stab her?”

He reaches for me—my hair. He leans down, his hand tightening, tilting my head back. “What do you mean, bambina?” His words are low, silky. “Are you afraid of me?”

I’m trembling, panting. “Should I be?”

Abruptly he releases me. My head jerks with the impact, but I’m still kneeling, and I catch myself on my hands. Loose gravel slides under my palms, reminding me of the roof above the Grand.

“Of course not,” he says. “I’m your father. We’ll go back home. Everything will go back to the way it was.”

It can never go back to the way it was. Not only because I don’t have Clara now. I’m changed too. Dancing at the Grand has changed me. Kip changed me.

Oh God, Kip.