CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I texted one of Chandler’s guys to pick me up. My car wasn’t to be trusted, not now, not after my father’s phone call last night. Maybe it was a ploy to get me out of my house so that he could snoop around or plant a bug—or worse, making sure I ended up charcoaled like our dead attorney. I wouldn’t have even left Tatum there alone if I hadn’t paid the security guard downstairs five hundred dollars to make sure no one but me stepped foot near my apartment until I got back.
Missing paperwork.
Something in my gut told me that wasn’t an accident. Dad was fucking with me. I just didn’t know exactly how yet, but I was determined to catch him in his game.
A guy I’d only met once before—pretty sure his name was Alec—pulled into the parking garage in a car identical to mine. Out on the street, the sidewalks were already bustling with tourists taking selfies, men in suits on cell phones, and women in pencil skirts and stilettos. The sky was blue and clear, and traffic was light.
I stared out the window, thinking about last night and wondering about the future, if Tatum would want to be a part of what I had planned. After what she’d learned about her father, I hoped she would.
I knew Tatum wasn’t breakable. I’d known it from the moment she’d called me astupidheadas I dragged her down the hallway when she was six years old. There was always a spark in her. All she needed was a little friction to turn it into a full-blown flame.
It wasn’t that I thought she couldn’t handle the truth. I was afraid thatIcouldn’t. I’d spent most of my life protecting her from the darkness. I didn’t want to be the one to shatter her with it. I couldn’t stand the thought of pushing her away.
She wasn’t naïve. She was simply one of the rare jewels that chose to see the light in the world over the darkness. She let the good outweigh the bad. She chose peace over chaos. Optimism over cynicism. Her inherent belief that the world was a good place with good people in it didn’t make her weak. It made her strong. After all, heroes—true heroes—weren’t the people who won the first round. They were the ones who lost and kept on fighting.
My girl was a fighter.
She proved it last night.
When I told her the truth about Khalid and her father, the pain in her eyes nearly crushed me. I knew that pain—the sting of betrayal from the person who was supposed to love you the most. I’d felt it ever since I was thirteen years old.
But she didn’t break. She opened up like a flower after the rain and handed me her pain. Right there against the tinted windows that no one could actually see through.
I’d been taking steps to earn her trust, wholly and completely, since I came back from Europe. I gave the truth to her in small doses, preparing for the ultimate climax. The one she needed to be strongest for. The truth to end all truths.
Soon.
I would tell her soon.
“Pull around to the back and wait for me. I won’t be long,” I told Alec once we made it to the title attorney’s office.
The receptionist at the front desk smiled widely when I walked through the door.
I scanned the office, already bored and ready to get this over with. There was a naked goddess in my bed waiting to be fucked.
“Caspian Donahue. You should have some paperwork for me.”
She thumbed through a stack of files, then held up a single finger. “One second, Mr. Donahue.” Her smile never faltered as she rolled her chair backward and got up to find whatever it was that I’d been summoned here to do.
She was back less than a minute later. “Good news.” Her eyes glittered. “Your paperwork was filed yesterday.” She leaned over the counter and showed me her tits. “Is there anything else you need?”
The fuck?
“Mrs. Talbot.” I glanced around the room, reading the gold nameplates in each door. “Which one is her office?”
Her drawn-in eyebrows bunched together. “Mrs. Talbot?”
My heart dropped to my shoes, and I slammed a fist on the wooden desk. “Fuck!”I knew it.
I bolted out the door and back to the car. “Get the fuck back to my apartment. Now!” I ran my fingers through my hair and leaned my head back on the headrest, squeezing my eyes shut while I prayed to fucking God that he hadn’t gotten to my apartment and found her yet. If he touched a hair on her motherfucking head, he was dead. I would murder that motherfucker and not even flinch.
***
Alec dropped me off in the parking garage, then I sent him to go pick up Chandler and be on stand-by.
“Everything good?” I asked the security guard standing outside the elevator that went straight up to my apartment.