I press my head between my knees and gulp air.
I need space.
“Raegan. Are you all right?”
Harrison’s voice comes from above me, but I don’t look up.
“What the hell happened?” he barks but not at me.
“A man approached her outside. Seems it triggered… this.”
Security radios the manager, whose voice I hear a moment later.
“I’ll take it from here,” Harrison says.
I’m swept into the back of a car, the leather seats worn yet too formal for the rawness eating me from the inside out.
I want to scream.
I want to die.
I wrap my arms around my knees and do neither.
* * *
Harrison
She’s gone.
Raegan is gone, and the woman curled in the back of the limo is someone I don’t know. Her cheeks shine with tears, her dark lashes blinking rapidly as she stares at the floor.
“Did he hurt you?” I ask, trying to keep my voice low and calm for her benefit. Inside, I’m enraged and worried.
She shakes her head once.
He might not have hurt her, but he scared the hell out of her.
Management said they’d captured the man and that he didn’t have a weapon. Which means he terrified her with his body or his words.
She’s swaying with the motion of the car, and I lean forward to tell the driver to keep driving. It seems to be helping, or at least not hurting.
“Raegan,” I say when I return to her, kneeling on the floor so I’m beneath her. “This happened before.”
She doesn’t answer.
“At my club?” I barely force out the words.
A slow headshake.
But my negligence did this—worse than this—to other women. Regret is heavy in my gut, a roiling grief that won’t relent.
“A long time ago,” she says at last.
She’s so fucking young now. That someone met her years before, wanted her, hurt her—it makes me murderous.
“I don’t talk about it.” Her grip on her knees tightens.
My fingers dig into the seat upholstery to keep from ripping the roof off the car. “If you tell me now, I won’t ask you to again.”