No matter what street I took or direction I chose, I couldn’t stop myself from looking over my shoulder…hoping.
Hoping he’d stalk around a corner and scold me for leaving such a note. Wishing he’d appear around a bend and kiss me stupid for ever thinking I had enough willpower to stay away.
Minutes had turned to hours, and those silly fantasies went unanswered.
He never appeared.
And I never turned back.
I’d left for his sake. I’d run away to heal him. I thought I was selfless enough to do it, but as afternoon morphed to evening and evening darkened to midnight, I wondered what new level of imbecility I’d risen to.
Didn’t I deserve to be safe and cared for?
Didn’t I earn the right to love and be loved in return?
He doesn’t love you.
I rubbed at the ice freezing my skin. Elder had never told me how he felt. For all I knew, I was still just a conquest, and my leaving would be met with relief instead of misery.
You know that’s not true.
But I had no willpower to convince myself because if I did…what would prevent me from running back to him and forcing him to live in agony all because I couldn’t imagine my life without him?
No.
I won’t do it.
My thoughts (no matter how scattered) were the only possessions I had as I continued to wander the streets of Monte Carlo. I had no luggage, no blankets, no money to trade unwelcoming footpaths for sympathetic beds.
This was my penance for telling a man he’d earned my heart only to walk out the door without a goodbye. My empty stomach daren’t growl because it deserved to have no fuel. My arthritic bones daren’t complain because they brought such discomfort on themselves. And I definitely didn’t allow the piercing laments of my heart to earn a single tear from me.
This was my fault, and I would pay the price to prevent Elder from doing so.
For an entire twenty-four hours, I lived in limbo.
As the streets emptied of law-abiding holidaymakers and were replaced with alcohol-fermented partiers, I kept to the shadows and out of sight.
Security guards patrolled outside their nightclubs and the police presence increased—protecting the rich and famous from bad decisions and terrible consequences.
It was the longest night of my life. Not only because I had nowhere to sit down and rest, but because I never stopped moving to avoid the beady eyes of other night-walkers.
This part of town had no homeless, and the glitz and finery wore down a piece of me I didn’t know I harboured: a certain kind of hate for wealth.
I might’ve been brutalised, but my captivity had been in a beautiful mansion dripping with money. Then I’d been rescued and stowed on the Phantom where its very creation was all thanks to Elder’s underhanded dealings.
I loved my bedroom on the Phantom, but until tonight, when I finally earned some grit beneath my sandals and dirt upon my hands, I’d forgotten what it was like not to have everything.
To be surrounded by shop windows full of thousand-dollar dresses and not be able to afford them. To smell the scents of pricey dinners in exclusive restaurants and not be able to eat.
Yet again, something else had been stolen from me: the value of things. Not that I ever took my living on the Phantom and all its luxuries for granted, of course, but for once, it was nice to worry about normal things—things Tasmin used to constantly fret over while Pimlico had forgotten by being kept as a toy.
Things like hours passing and no way to tell the time. Concerns like itineraries and no way to get to where I needed to go. Problems like the mundaneness of life and being responsible for my own person.
My thoughts kept me distracted from my flat feet and sore back as dawn slowly approached and prettily made-up women turned to tipsy makeup-smeared consorts, and men went from handsome devils to morally-corrupted scoundrels.
Ducking out of the way of a domestic, and staying to the shadows to avoid the eyes of security guards, I poked at the open wound by leaving Elder. All night, I’d been a game of roulette as my mind spun the wheel and my choices between staying away and returning became the little white ball.
Sometimes, that ball landed on red. Red…the colour of love, of passion, of blood and rage and lust.
But sometimes, it landed on black. Black…the colour of desperation, of grief, of wrongness and hate and confusion and pain.
Neither gave me an answer I could live with.
Dawn crept to daybreak.
I looked at the horizon and saw how far I’d walked.
My heart hiccupped at the amount of distance I’d placed between Elder and me. My feet turned mutinous, wanting to go backward rather than forward.
All I wanted to do was kneel before him and promise I’d never again ask him to touch, kiss, or bed me. If that was the sacrifice for his friendship and protection, then so be it. I would pay it lifetimes over.