I kept driving, innately keeping my eyes out for signs of trouble. Would I recognize it in the faces I passed by?—the kindred spirit of a monster? I didn’t know, so I looked anyway. The hours passed in a blur of faces. Young, old, men, women; none of them stirred anything inside me. No alarms. No intuitive pull toward a fellow evil spirit.
The only thing to take up my mind was sickening images, made even more gruesome because I didn’t have to imagine what could be happening to her. I knew firsthand the things monsters were capable of because I was one. By the time my phone rang, the images of Scar had me so tortured I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t open my mouth or I’d end up screaming and I’d never stop. Instead, I pressed the button and held it to my ear with a trembling hand.
“I’ve landed. I’ll meet you at the Inspira Café in twenty minutes. Meet me there.”
I made some strangled noise of agreement in my throat, turned off the phone and tossed it on the seat next to me. Scar’s seat. The place her body had occupied not ten hours before.
Get it the fuck together, her voice of reason spoke in my head. I listened. It was my turn to obey.
By the time I reached the café, I had it together. I’d tucked every selfish feeling of agonizing misery down deep. It would be there waiting for me later. And if I didn’t get to her in time, I deserved every gut-wrenching second it would bring. It would only be seconds though. Maybe deep down I really was a coward, because if I couldn’t save her, if she died or was lost irrevocably, I’d blow my fucking brains out. I deserved the eternity in hell I had coming to me.
It only took me about three seconds to spot him. No disguise. No obvious bodyguards lurking around. Of course, there wasn’t. James Donovan was an average individual who hadn’t existed until the day he’d stolen Scar and killed my parents. Before that, he’d been James Garcia—that man needed protecting, not the man in the café who could have passed for an ordinary businessman.
The overwhelming rush of anger I felt when I saw him surprisingly had little to do with my parents’ death. The desperate urge to rip him apart limb from limb stemmed from his carelessness with Scar. If he’d been protecting her, using even a small fragment of his fortune to have her watched over, a monster would never have been able to get his hands on her. The men I’d had take her would have been shot dead on the spot, and she would be safe.
I kept my hands to myself though. It was easy to blame him because I needed to blame someone. Someone needed to die for what happened to her, but the bitter truth of it was, that someone was me. I’d get to that, just not yet.
“Donovan.” I nodded to him as I slid into the seat across from him.
“You look younger than I expected,” he observed, looking me over to size me up.
He wasn’t wrong. For years after he’d rescued me, Marcos had teased me about not looking old enough to fuck, never mind train pleasure slaves. Even now, I could still pass for a couple years younger than my 25 years.
Nevertheless, it was a comment meant to establish himself as the superior in this arrangement, and I wasn’t about to let that slide. I returned the once over and then met his eyes, “And you look rather worse for wear after your years in suburbia.”
“Touché,” he replied and his shoulders loosened. The expression on his face relaxed, but he wasn’t fooling me. A man with eyes as cold as his never actually let down his guard. It was an act, but I had no choice other than to play along. Still, this wasn’t a social call.
“Have you heard any news?”
“I have to admit, Derek, it was a rather big risk calling me. I could have lured you here just to kill you for taking my daughter.”
“I know that.”
“And you’ve called me here anyways, which means you either intend to kill me for what I did to your little family or else you have some very desperate need to get Scarlett back.”
“If I’d intended to kill you, I would have done it the second I walked in the door.”
He was silent, considering. “I am inclined to believe you. Tell me though, what did you do to my daughter?”
Fuck, this was not going to be a productive path to travel down, so I summed it up as succinctly as I could. “She was meant to be my vengeance for what you stole from me.”
“Yes, I gathered that, but I want to know what you did to her.”