Fifteen Minutes Earlier
“Where are you headed?”
The man at the gate is ruggedly handsome. He’s got a dark brown beard dusted with silver and an impressive jawline. Probably around Kian’s age, if not a touch older.
“You don’t need to know that,” I tell him.
He raises his eyebrows in amusement and backs off. “I was just going to offer you a drive, ma’am.”
I look past the gate at the miles of road I’m going to have to traverse before I can get anywhere hitchhiking. Also, I’m pretty sure that Hamptons residents aren’t really big on hitchhiking in the first place. Still, I don’t want to accept any more help from Kian or his men than I need to. “No, I can find my own way.”
He shrugs his broad shoulders. “Your call.” Then he nods to the men behind him. When the gate cranks open, he gestures for me to go ahead. “You’re free to go.”
I pause for a moment. The road ahead seems so wide open. So free.
This has to be a trap, doesn’t it? Any second now, Kian is going to come charging out and sneer in my face about how stupid I must be if I really believed he was letting me go. Either that or a hole in the ground is going to open up like I’m in some evil supervillian’s lair and deliver me right back to The Room beneath the mansion.
But nothing happens. Nothing moves.
The man who opened the gate is looking at me oddly. I give him a curt nod and avoid all the other security guards and their curious stares as I stride away from the mansion’s walls with my head held high.
The duffel bag is slung across my shoulder for even weight distribution. I’d been conscientious about not taking too much from the wardrobe. But since I had nothing in the way of worldly possessions, I was forced to think practically. So I’d stuffed the duffel bag with clothes. I picked practical, everyday options. Jeans, t-shirts, and of course the Nikes I’d admired before. I’m glad I grabbed this jacket, too—there’s a strange chill in the air. I shrug it tighter around myself.
I wish I would’ve snagged a hat. Anything to keep eyes off my face. The last thing I need is unwanted attention. I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime.
As I walk down the road, the mansion growing smaller and smaller in the background, the fire I’d felt at fleeing Kian morphs into something else entirely. Dread, maybe.
I have no idea where I’m headed. I don’t have a home. I’ve never had friends. The only family member I have is in hiding, and despite what Kian and Aisling think, I really don’t know where to find him. Even if I did, I’m not sure I’d want to find him.
It feels like my best move is to just slip back into the streets of New York City and try to figure out where I can go from there. I need an escape plan first, and then a means to survive.
It strikes me, as I turn the corner and Kian’s mansion disappears from view entirely, that I’ve never actually been on my own in my entire life. There’s always been a man at my shoulder, breathing down my neck.
I wait for the sweeping relief to engulf me the way I always dreamed it would. But nothing comes. I’m too nervous about my uncertain future to feel anything but fear.
“Breathe, Renata,” I tell myself softly. “This is what you wanted.”
It’s not the victory I’ve imagined. Even less expected is the strange and looming sense of disappointment overwhelming me.
He let me go. I hadn’t expected that.
Which means that everything I’ve been feeling around Kian was one-sided. I was only ever an inconvenience. A twist in the plot that Kian never expected. He never felt anything.
That, in turn, begs another question: what exactly am I feeling for him?
My head is spinning from all the different emotions, all the conflicting opinions warring with one another in my confused head. Sometimes, my doubts are my own.
But there are moments when they take the form of my brother’s voice. If I’m being honest with myself, he’s the personification of my guilt. The reason that my desire for Kian feels dirty, tainted… ugly.
I remember so vividly the first time I ever laid eyes on the Irish don. It’s not a moment I’m likely to forget any time soon. I may have been five, but some memories are so powerful they stick to the walls of your mind, and you return to them so often that they take on a life and a depth of their own.
I watched the blue-eyed bastard murder my father. But I’d been calm. Even when he’d walked over and bent down in front of me, hands dripping with Papa’s blood, I wasn’t scared. He had looked at me with those cool blue eyes that still managed to retain their warmth. He’d something to me along the lines of, “One day you’ll understand.”
I’m not sure I do. Even after all these years.
But I want to.
Why on earth couldn’t I be attracted to a normal guy? Someone closer to my own age. Someone boring and safe and comforting. What might that even look like? I try to imagine it, but I can’t. I haven’t the faintest idea of what a normal life might look like for me. I’ve always lived in the eye of the storm. In the midst of chaos.