I Am Brave
Dahlia
“Are you sure you have to go to work today?” Vex reaches over and takes my hand in his. “I could cancel my plans, and we could spend the whole day in the library. You have to work on the next book for me.”
“For you?”
He squeezes my hand. “Yeah, that next book you’re writing is all for me. I get to read it first.”
“Before my editor?” No one ever reads them before she does a full workup on them.
“Before anyone.”
“But—”
“Dahl, I want all of you. The good, the bad, and the typos. Trust me with all of yourself.”
That’s evil. “There will be a lot of typos.”
His lips tip up.
“And run-on sentences.”
A smile spreads across his face.
“Not to mention a plot hole or three.”
Those lips move closer to mine. “I’m looking forward to reading every one of them.”
Trust, not fear. “Okay.”
“Good.” He stands up.
“What, that’s it? You’re not going to kiss me?”
That smile turns into a smirk. “Nope, you’d be late if I did.”
Evil, teasing man. A little late wouldn’t be too bad.
“Promise me you won’t get into any trouble while I’m busy today.”
There’s that word again. “I’m not trouble.”
A forehead kiss is the only response I get. Irritating man!
***
Vex wasn’t kidding when he said he had stuff to do today. He never leaves before I do. It stinks having to walk out that door without kissing him goodbye. I grab my purse just as the bell rings.
Who’s visiting at this time of the morning?
Hope! What’s she doing here? “Don’t you have school?” It is a weekday.
“Dad is taking me with him to Australia today.”
Max smiles from where he stands behind Hope.
“That sounds like so much fun. When do you leave?” Maybe we should take a vacation soon and get away from the cold weather.
“In about an hour. But I can’t leave until you tell my father I’m right.”
Oh. Oh. That’s not good. I turn to Max.
He shrugs.
Hope marches straight into my kitchen.
“Are you hungry? I could make you something to eat.”
“No, Nonna made her special pancakes. You need to try them. They’re amazing.” Hope stops in front of the drawer where my unreleased book is. She takes it out and holds it up like a trophy. “See Dad, Prue knows what she’s talking about when it comes to being an author. She’s D. P. Flowers.”
“I know.”
Wait, what?
“How do you know that?”
“I know everything about everyone that lives in the neighborhood. You know I’ll do whatever I have to in order to keep you safe.”
Max knows everything? He can’t know everything. It was too long ago for there to be anything for him to find.
“Then you have to trust Prue when she tells you that I’m right.”
This conversation makes my head hurt. “What are you talking about?”
Hope wraps her arms around my book. “I want to be an author.”
“That’s wonderful.” But definitely not cause for an early morning visit.
“Writing is a lonely job. I don’t like being alone.”
It’s kind of the nature of the job. “No one can write your words for you.” Ghostwriters technically can, but why become an author to just pay someone else to do your job?
“I know that. But I don’t want to do it alone. So I came up with a plan.”
Teenagers and plans… that’s not concerning at all.
“You’re too young. You need to go to college.” He isn’t giving in to her.
Hope’s chin juts out as her hand goes to her hip. “You didn’t go to college. You knew what you wanted to do at my age. I’m not a child. I’ll be eighteen in just a few weeks.”
Max stares at her.
Is this going to be a father-daughter batter of wills? “What is this plan of yours?”
“When I write, I want to be surrounded by people and books.”
That sounds like fun and a challenge. “Working at a library can be fun.”
Hope shakes her head. “Authors don’t make money in the beginning.”
“You don’t need to make money,” Max interrupts.
“Yes, I do. I don’t want my father giving me money until I’m old and grey. ”
“Well, I’m going to do it until the day I die. Then it will all be yours, anyway.” Max folds his arms across his chest.
Hope turns back to me. “Do you see what I have to deal with?”
A father loving and protecting his daughter. “I do. Why don’t you explain to your father why it’s so important to you that you make your own money?”
“Because I don’t want to live in your shadow like a pampered princess. I want to be a strong, independent woman like Nonna. Like my mom would have wanted me to be.”
“Hope.” Max walks over and envelops his daughter in a hug. “You’re so young.”
“What if she does an internship?” They both turn towards me. “I have a friend who runs a bakery nearby. They serve food and fun drinks. Pretty much what Hope wants to do, minus the books and writing.”
“See, Dad. It’s perfect. I’ll intern with Prue’s friend. Then when I turn eighteen, I’ll buy my own place.”
She’ll buy it?
Max doesn’t look completely convinced. “I have two terms.”
“Name them.” Hope gets that stubborn tilt of her chin from her father.
“I’ll be in charge of your security. And if you ever need any money, you come to me, not a bank or another family member.”
“But you’ll just give me the money. I want to do it on my own.”
“Fine, I’ll loan you the money. With no interest for the first five years and after that half a percent until it’s paid off.”
“Dad,” Hope whines.
“Those are my terms. Take them or leave them. I’m not letting you risk your life for a business or get into debt.”
“Fine.”
It’s too cute that she’s pouting even though she won. Max has got his hands full with her.
“Who is your friend? Do you think she’ll let me start immediately?” Hope has a one-track mind .
“Fiona runs Sweet Dreams Bakery on Willow Street.”
“It had to be Fea. Of course, it had to be Fea,” Max mutters. His hand goes into his hair, and he tugs on one of his curls. “Hope, how about you do an internship at my company? We have coffee shops in every one of the offices. You can take your pick.”
“Why? Fea is really nice.” Hope stares at her dad with assessing eyes.
“Wait, you both know Fiona.”
“Long story. Let’s go Hope. We don’t want to make Prue late for work.”
“But Dad—”
With one look from him, her mouth shuts and they’re out the door as fast as they came in.
She’s brave.
Hope is just a child, and she’s ready to take on the world.
Here I am afraid to tell my mother about my boyfriend.
I’m a coward.
My mother loves me. She’ll love Vex too once she gets to know him…
But I don’t know him. I know his heart, but fear has kept me from asking anything more about him.
He’s a good man.
Then why are you afraid to ask about his childhood?
Or what he does now?
You know the world sees him as a criminal.
Why keep hiding from the reality of who he is?
Because I’m a coward, who’s afraid of everything.
***
“Dahl, I’m home.”
You are brave.
You can do this! I march to the front door. “We need to talk. ”
“Is something wrong?”
“We need to talk.”
“Okay, let’s talk.” Vex yanks his tie off.
That man is so sexy. Don’t get distracted. You’re not going to keep hiding from your future. I take his hand. “Not here.”
“Dahl?”
You’re brave. “It’ll be okay. No matter what happens, I love you.”
Vex reaches out and one minute I’m walking up the stairs, the next I’m wrapped in his arms, staring up into his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m a coward.”
“Dahl.”
“No, I am. I spent most of my life hiding from my problems. And I never want the fact that I’m a coward to ruin us.”
“That won’t happen.”
He doesn’t understand just how much I can stick my head in the sand. “We need to talk.”
“Then we’ll talk. But Dahl, you and I are forever.”
“I love you so much.” It’s tempting to let those lips of his distract me forever. “You can’t kiss me. Because if you kiss me, I’ll forget everything, but how wonderful your lips are.”
“Okay.” Vex sets me down.
“The library is all set up.” I take his hand and dash up the stairs.
“S’mores and scary stories.” He stands at the door, staring at the little tent I built in between the bookshelves.
“Yeah.”
“Do you have scary stories to tell me?”
Just one. But I’ll never have the strength to talk about that. “You’re going to do the talking. I’m going to be shoving the pre-made s’mores in my mouth.”
“You really want to do this?”
No. It’s the last thing I ever want to do. “We need to do this. ”
“Okay.” He slips off his shoes and sinks down into the nest of pillows and blankets that I made.
Instead of sitting down next to him, I sit across from him, grabbing a s’more.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You. I love you, and I know who you are in your heart, but I don’t know you. Let me get to know the real you. The dichotomy between the man I see in front of me and the man you lead me to believe you are confuses me. Who are you? Do you have any family? Are you a crime lord, a vigilante, a counterfeiter, or something else?”
“Counterfeiter?”
I shrug. “You have a lot of money. And that’s a relatively innocuous crime. Who hasn’t imagined printing money?”
“Dahl, you have a wild imagination.”
It’s kind of a requirement for my job. Responding could set us off on a tangent, so I sit silently watching him.
“Can you really handle this? Because I’m not the man you think I am.”
“You are the man I think you are. There isn’t anything that you can tell me you’ve done that would make me think otherwise.”
“I’m a human trafficker.”
What! The s’more slips out of my fingers. A man who saves women can’t sell women to be hurt. Take a breath. There’s more to this than the pain and challenge in his eyes. “Explain that to me.”
He shakes his head. “You aren’t running away.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I tell you I’m a human trafficker and you ask me to explain.”
“Yes.” Before my courage fades away.
“My father bought my mother—”
Bought his mother!
“—with the express purpose of having an heir. Her first pregnancy resulted in the birth of my sister.”
Vex has a sister! Why haven’t I met her ?
“A few weeks after my sister was born, I was conceived.”
He feels guilty for being born. The pain his mother must have gone through isn’t lost on him. I hate his father.
“My father kept my mother around until we could keep ourselves alive. Then he sold her.”
“Just like that? He sold your mother.”
“Women had no value to him. The only thing that mattered to him was money and me. I was the way part of him lived on.”
How horrible.
“Almost from the moment I could stand, my father started training me to kill and how to run the family business. The first time I took a life I was eight.”
Eight! I can’t hold back the gasp that escapes my lips. Who makes an eight-year-old kill? A monster.
“You’d think that would have scarred me.”
It did, even if you can’t acknowledge it.
“But the man I killed made my father look like a saint. My father didn’t value women and he didn’t understand pain or regret, but he never hurt people just for the fun of hurting others. It was all about the money. The man I killed tortured for fun. My father didn’t care about that, though. He just wanted money. There was never enough money.”
Is that how Vex got all this money?
“The one bright spot in my childhood was my sister. Somehow, in all of the darkness that was our life, she always remained in the light. Not quite joyful—no one could be joyful with the way we lived—but she didn’t let it get her down.”
I’m so glad he had one person to give him some peace.
“The thing about my father was you never said no to him. My sister knew it. I knew it. The world knew it. That word signed many death certificates. I never dreamed of doing anything but what my father said— ”
Self-preservation is a strong instinct. I want to take his hand and give him the comfort that he needs… that I need, but he’s closed himself off in order to tell me all of this.
“—until he sold my sister.”
WHAT? How could you sell your own child?
“She was worth too much for him not to. The day I walked in and she wasn’t there was the day I killed my father. And I only wish I’d done it sooner.”
Vex rid the world of another monster, but he’ll live with the guilt of not saving his sister. He doesn’t need to tell me for me to know she didn’t survive.
“That was the first job I paid Torment to do. But he never found her. She disappeared into a world full of misery and pain or death. Torment found a ship full of women that went down. He… we think she was on it. By the time there was a submersible capable of going down that far, all the bodies were gone. So, I’ll never know what happened to my sister.”
The pain he must feel…
“Since then, I’ve hunted down and killed every human trafficker I could find.”
“You lied to me.”
Vex blinks. “What?”
“You aren’t a human trafficker.”
“I sold people, Dahl. I took freedom away from people for money. I am and will always be a human trafficker.”
“You’re lying to yourself, too. You aren’t a human trafficker. As a child you were forced to do things—” My body shudders. “—horrible things. But the man you are, chose to save people. That doesn’t make you a human trafficker. That makes you a hero.”
“I’m hardly a hero. Doing this has made me more money than I could ever imagine. More than most people can comprehend.”
“So?”
He shakes his head at me.
“You make money and save people. I don’t see the problem there. ”
“Dahl. All my money comes from human trafficking. It’s dirty.”
“All your money comes from saving people. And if I were a betting woman, I’d say you use that money in order to save more women.”
“It isn’t cheap, nor is the fund to make sure that the women Payne and I manage to save can live a stress-free life. But—”
“No more buts. I was right about the man you are.”
“How can you say that? I’ve killed so many people.”
Skip this. Vex needs a hug. I hurl my body across the space separating us.
My brave, broken man. If he can stand up and fight after all he’s been through, I can tell my mother. I can be brave too.
My therapist would say something about false correlations, but I don’t care. I will be brave!