Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-two
Achilles
One more month like this and she’d have loved me back.
It would have been Stockholm syndrome at its finest.
One more month, and she’d be mine.
But that wasn’t the way I wanted things to be between us. Not anymore.
And so, despite my natural predatory instinct to use every dirty trick in the book to get what I want, I found myself driving her back from Maryland back to New York, to her cunt-bag of a brother.
She was alert the entire ride, staring out the window. Even though she didn’t talk, I knew this wasn’t one of her dark spells. The color was back in her face. Her eyes were shining again, her pupils responsive to what was going on around her.
It comforted me to know she was okay. For weeks, I’d watched her breathe while she was asleep, living but barely alive, acutely aware that her vulnerability was also my own.
I savored every fucking second with her in that car like it was my last on earth.
It wasn’t fair that I was still losing her when I’d finally gotten my head out of my ass and done the right thing again.
Only it was.
It was fucking fair, and I knew it.
I had made her life hell, took the thing most important to her—her freedom—and then nearly killed her on top of it.
She had every right to forgive me at her own pace.
That pace could be tomorrow, in ten years, or never at all.
When we reached Lila and Tiernan’s place, she flung the passenger door open without even looking at me. In fact, she waited until her back was to me and she was in front of their door before she spoke.
“Don’t bother trying to contact me again. You’re dead to me.”
I floored the accelerator and was out of there before I had the chance to kidnap her back to the cabin.