CHAPTER FIFTEEN RONAN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RONAN
NOW
Stalking Chloe through a hospital isn’t one of my proudest moments, but this is the only way I could get her alone without that hulking asshole getting between us.
I didn’t expect him to stay in the waiting room, but his carelessness is my gain.
There was very little information on the guy when I ran a quick background check, but I have my guy working on getting more.
There’s no way Camilla De Marco has an untrained man guarding someone that means anything to her, which means Ryker has to have a past, and I’m determined to find everything I can on the motherfucker.
Partially because I need to know what I’m coming up against when we move to take Chloe back to Florida, and partially because the way he looks at my woman has my skin crawling.
No.
Not my woman.
Not anymore.
Now she’s just a loose end to be taken care of.
I wait a full minute before following her into the restroom, giving anyone else that may be inside a chance to leave before I step inside, flicking the lock to ensure we’re not interrupted.
Chloe stands at the sink, her eyes downcast on her hands in the water, and I don’t hesitate to step up behind her.
She won’t get the chance to run from me this time. I deserve an explanation. I deserve to know why she left without so much as a word.
Why she didn’t trust me enough to let me know she was okay but trusted Kingston fucking Beaumont to be her knight in shining armor.
And I deserve to know where my kid is.
Once I’m close enough, I slip my hand over her mouth, cutting her off before she can scream, and when her eyes meet mine in the mirror, all I see is terror.
“Wandering off without your bodyguard is pretty stupid, don’t you think?” The roughness of my own voice surprises me, but I’m too caught up in the way she feels against me to dwell on it.
No one ever felt this right after her. Every woman that’s touched me in the last decade has been wrong, has made my skin crawl more than the last. It never occurred to me that if I were to ever have Chloe back in my arms that she would still feel just as right as she did when we were dumb kids.
I shake off the thought and focus on the task at hand. It wasn’t easy to get away from Damon, but after a couple of days without much sleep, he fell asleep the second we walked into the hotel room we checked into when we arrived in New York.
If he wakes up and finds me missing, I have no doubt he’ll know exactly where I am, but he doesn’t need to be here for this.
I’m already the weak brother, the disappointment. I don’t need him seeing how much power the woman pressed to my front has over me even after all these years.
“Did you think you could run from me, Little Liar?” I murmur against the shell of her ear.
Even now, we look perfect together. Like she was made to be mine, but I understand now that looks can be deceiving, and as tempting as it may be to fall into old habits, I won’t let myself fall into this one.
“Did you think I’d never find you? That I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life searching for you and our child?” I spit the word.
At first the idea of having a baby scared the shit out of me, as it would any eighteen-year-old boy who had used condoms religiously, but then something settled inside me.
Chloe and I were endgame, or at least I thought we were, and that meant we could handle anything, including a kid.
But she took my choice away. She took our future when she ran, and I’ve missed the first ten years of my child’s life, something I’ll never forgive her for.
She flinches in my arms, her eyes pinching shut as if I physically struck her.
I don’t get a chance to say another word before Chloe starts thrashing against me. She throws her head back, narrowly missing my nose and instead clipping my chin in a move that probably hurts her more than it does me.
When that doesn’t work, she drops her weight in my arms, but it’s not enough to throw me off balance, but it does open the opportunity to do something I’m too distracted to notice.
Lifting her legs, she wedges her feet against the sink and shoves us backward, which sends us both falling to the tiled floor.
I land with a grunt, but Chloe doesn’t make a sound as she pushes herself up with more speed than I expect, putting as much distance between us as the small room will allow.
Luckily, I landed closer to the door, which puts me between her and the only exit, something she is all too aware of as her eyes flicker between me and her freedom.
I chuckle, the sound bouncing off the tiles. “Good to see you haven’t lost your fire, Chloe.”
“What do you want, Ronan?” she snaps, but there’s an edge of fear I’ve come to love over the years. Losing her broke something inside me, made me crave the terror of others, and hers might be the most addictive of all.
“So many things, Little Liar. I want to know why you left without a word. I want to know why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant. And I want to know where the fuck my kid is.”
Her eyes press closed for a beat as she takes a steadying breath. I’m ready to demand answers again, to storm across the room and corner her until she can tell me what I want to know, but then the eyes I fell in love with all those years ago open, and complete despair stares back at me.
The heartbreak that tore me apart, that broke me and changed me irreversibly, looks back at me like we’re still looking into a mirror.
Seeing Chloe distressed stops me in my tracks just like it did when we were kids, except now I’m the one that caused it.
Fuck.
I can’t allow the pretty girl I used to love to put me under her spell again.
“Answer me,” I growl.
“There is no kid,” she whispers, her voice hoarse with emotion. “The trauma of watching my parents be tortured in front of me while tied to a chair, denied food and water for days on end, didn’t make for a hospitable environment so early in pregnancy.” Each word cuts me deeper than the last.
Because her account is a lot fucking different from my father’s and Damon’s.
“I lost the baby two days after I escaped.”
My knees almost give way beneath me, and my chest clenches so tight I can barely drag in a breath.
All these years I thought she was living a happy life with our child, that she was keeping them from me, but I was wrong.
I was lied to.
My mouth opens but nothing comes out.
A little life she never got the chance to tell me about is gone. A life that was half me and half her. The product of our love.
“And I didn’t know I was pregnant when you left. I took the test right before your father’s goons came for me. I barely had a chance to process it before I was tied to a chair and beaten as a tool to make Dad talk.” She spits the words, her anger just as thick as my despair.
All these years I thought she walked out the gates and never came back.
I was fed the lie that she took my child and ran.
But the reality is so much worse.
Because not only did Chloe only leave to save herself and our baby, but I’ve spent the last decade hating her for it.