"Sixteen months," Rafael said, watching my face as I tried to do the math. "It's been sixteen months since the first time I saw you, standing on the sidewalk across fromFists of Fury."
All the air expelled from my lungs as my body sagged. The day came crashing back over me, the way I'd stared at the mysterious man across the street and thought about the darkness that surrounded him.
I'd wanted him even then, but known that he would never be anything other than disaster for a girl like me.
"That was you," I whispered, backing away from him and stumbling over my steps. I fell to the ground on my ass, staring up at the devil in front of me in horror. Joaquin looked like he might try to intervene, his body jerking as if he meant to protect me. But even he stilled with a glare from Rafael as he reached down and plucked me off the ground. "Why?" I couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend that choice. To wrap my head around the months of planning and manipulating that must have happened for us to end up right where we were.
He ignored the question, continuing on with his story as he wanted. "A few days later, your sister and her friend drugged you," he said. My body went still, remembering the vague recollections I'd had of the phantom in the night. The fact that Joaquin had never made me feel the way he supposedly did when I'd been drugged. "Two weeks later, I killed him for what he tried to do to you. To what wasalready mine,” he rumbled.
His grip tightened around my upper arm as I cried, shaking my head from side to side as I tried to deny the truth that stared me in the face. I tried to find another explanation, but instead of reassurance there was just nothing.
"I watched you. I studied you. And when the time came for you to finally come to Ibiza, I used what I knew to make you fall in love with me," he said.
I opened my mouth to speak, but found myself suddenly stripped of my voice. Something inside me cracked, breaking open while they watched and it felt like I bled all over the ground.
Everything I'd thought I'd known had been a lie.
Nothing but a game to a man who'd violated me before I'd even known he existed.