Promise to Keep (Vow To Protect 2)

Adrian starts toward me and lowers his voice to a deadly whisper. “You won’t give me orders in my own home, Valentina.”

I square off with him, knowing that he won’t hurt me even this angry. “No, I don’t want to give you orders, but I can see you both calculating how to get revenge for this. But it’s not your vengeance to take. It’s hers.”

He waves at the screen. “The attack was on her, but this…fucking video is for me. It’s a taunt for me, not for her.” He lifts the envelope and throws it back on the table. “It was even addressed to me.”

I slide to sit on the table, my legs shaking so hard I can’t stay upright. He can yell at me all he wants, but I’ll never stop defending Andrea’s right to go after her own attackers. If I’d been stronger, I would have done the same.

I hear her high heels just in time to lunge off the table and block the doorway. She comes up short with over a foot of height on me. “What…the hell?”

I spread my arms across the entrance and shake my head. “Private meeting.”

Her forehead bunches, and she crosses her arms. “Are you in charge now? Have you killed Adrian and taken over without any of us noticing? Considering how far Kai has been up your ass recently, I don't think that’s even possible.”

I barely flinch at her tone, and I don’t blame her. She’s been in attack first, ask questions later mode since everything happened. “No, he’s in here with me, just slower to get to the door.”

Her mouth twists in a macabre smile. “Stop playing around, Val, and let me in.”

I set my jaw and shake my head again. “Sorry.”

Her eyes rove my tear-streaked face, and no doubt she sees the pain in my eyes. Except she mistakes my sympathy for pity.

“Get the hell out of the way, or I’ll move you,” she snaps.

I hold firm, and she shoves me hard at the shoulders before I even register she’s put her hands on me.

Stumbling back, I land on my ass in the middle of the room. Adrian is in her face less than a second later. “What the hell is your problem?”

The only reason he hasn’t hit her back is because of what he just saw. Hesitation is his own form of sympathy, but again, she doesn't take it that way. This time, she goes for Adrian’s throat.

Kai finally steps in and gets her in a hold in less than a second. She goes frantic, her eyes wild, her body jerking and fighting against this. But it’s not the carefully disciplined moves she learns every day but the fervent dangerous, formless fight of the trapped.

“Let her go,” I say, getting to my feet, my hands stinging from scraping on the floor.

As usual, no one listens to me. “Let her go,” I say again, this time placing my hand gently on Kai’s forearm. Everyone freezes, and Adrian hauls me back.

It takes a minute, but Kai relaxes his grip, and Andrea scrambles out of his hold, shoving him away. “I don’t know what the hell is go—” Her eyes finally snag on the screen, and she knows.

She knows.

“You…” Her breath shudders out of her. “You saw it?”

She folds her arms around her middle, and I want to comfort her so badly. Adrian refuses to let me go, no matter how much I try to squirm from his iron grasp. Right now, she’s dangerous. A cornered creature looking to claw her way back to reality. I know both that cage and that border intimately.

I turn in Adrian’s grasp to meet his eyes. “She won’t hurt me. When she pushed me, she probably didn’t realize I’d go down so hard. She needs a friend, and I’m the only female in this house who can help her get through this with her soul intact.”

He smooths my curls away from my face with one hand, his fingers gentle but unyielding. His eyes hold a million questions and a million answers, but he gives me one sharp nod and then releases his grasp.

I approach her slowly, hands up in surrender. “It’s okay. We are the only ones who saw it. No one else.”

A choked sob escapes her throat, and she turns away to stifle any more than might come out. I give her a minute before skirting wide to look at her face again. “If anyone knows what you’re going through, it’s me. We already talked about this, remember? What you see on my face now, it’s not pity, it’s anger...it’s sympathy...it’s the need to drive a knife through those bastards’ hearts and then keep them alive long enough to feed them their own dicks.”

I clamp my mouth shut, a little surprised at my own thirst for violence. Her eyes lock on mine, wary but surprised too. “I don’t want them to see it. They will think I’m weak.”