Chapter 23 #2
My old friend walks into the lobby of Redthorne Holdings alone, his face gray beneath the overhead lights, his suit wrinkled and hanging loose on his diminished frame.
His tie is gone. The collar of his shirt is open and damp with sweat.
His eyes are red-rimmed, the whites bloodshot, and his hands shake at his sides with a tremor composed of one hundred percent of fear.
He stops when he sees Sloane. She stands beside me with my jacket around her shoulders and her bare face pale with exhaustion.
Her lipstick is gone. Her victory rolls have loosened into soft waves around her jaw.
She looks young without the armor. She looks like his daughter, not the woman who just shot a man in both knees, and I watch that realization break across Harrison's face before he takes another step.
When she looks up at her father I watch her expression cycle through so many things so quickly that I can't catalog them all. Anger. Grief. Disgust. And underneath all of it, buried deep, is the stubborn, unkillable flicker of a daughter who still wants her father to be better than he is.
Harrison stops in front of Sloane and his chin drops and his mouth opens and nothing comes out. He tries again. His lips move and his throat works and a sound escapes that isn't quite a word.
"I'm sorry." It comes out broken, the syllables cracking apart in his mouth.
His chin trembles so hard his teeth chatter.
His eyes fill and he doesn't blink them back.
He lets the tears fall, tracking down the grooves of his face, dripping off the jaw that Sloane inherited, landing in dark spots on the marble floor between his shoes.
"You deserved a better father, Sloane. You deserved a father who chose you over everything else.
I chose my business. I chose my pride. I chose to use you because I convinced myself I was smarter than everyone in the room and I wasn't. I was the biggest fool at the table and my daughter paid for it. "
The lobby is silent. I hear my own breathing.
My hands are in my pockets, my fingers curled into fists, my nails cutting crescents into my palms. I want to step between them.
I want to shield her from this the way I've shielded her from everything.
But this conversation belongs to Sloane and her father and the only thing I can do is stand here and let her have it.
Sloane holds her father's gaze. Her blue eyes are dry, her jaw set, her hands still at her sides. She doesn't move toward him. She doesn't step back. She just stands there and lets him look at what he almost destroyed and I could not love her more at this moment.
"You're right. There isn't anything you can say that makes it right."
Harrison's face crumples. His shoulders curve inward, his chest caving, his hands hanging limp. I watch a man who controlled boardrooms and empires fold in front of his daughter's steady voice.
“But you're here." Her voice is steady and quiet and carries a strength that makes my chest ache.
She folds her arms across her stomach, the only sign that this is costing her anything.
"I deserved a father who chose me. You didn't. That's your guilt to carry.
Not mine. I was always there. It was you who refused to see me.
" She pauses. Her jaw tightens. Her nostrils flare on a controlled breath.
"But you're here now. That's where we start. If we start. I don’t know if I can forgive everything you’ve done.”
“I understand.” Harrison nods. The movement is small, barely a dip of his chin, and the tears continue down his face unchecked.
He opens his mouth to speak and closes it.
Opens it again. Then he reaches forward and presses a soft touch to the side of her face.
It's clumsy and desperate and not nearly enough, but I know it's all he has.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't lean in. She lets his hand rest on her hair for three seconds. Then she reaches up and gently lifts it away.
My throat burns. I stand beside her and say nothing because there are no words for watching a father reach for his daughter and watching the daughter give him hope that his mistakes may not cost him everything entirely.
He nods again. Turns. Walks out of the lobby with his footsteps echoing on the marble until the front door closes behind him with a sound that carries thirty years of failure and the first fragile breath of accountability.
I take full advantage of how tired she looks and pull her through the lobby and back to the penthouse. Lucky for me she doesn’t fight me.
The first pale light of dawn presses against the eastern horizon, turning the sky from black to deep blue to the faintest blush of gold above the lake. The penthouse is quiet.
We sit on the sofa. Not touching. A foot of cushion between us that hums with everything unsaid.
I can feel her body heat across the gap, faint and warm, and my skin aches for the contact my mouth hasn't earned back yet.
The sight of her small frame still wearing my jacket puts a pressure in my chest that borders on physical pain.
The quiet is different from every silence we've shared.
It doesn't hum. It doesn't rest. It waits, patient and careful, for one of us to be brave enough to fill it.
"I was wrong." I lean forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped between them.
My voice is low, rough, stripped of every defense.
"Not for wanting to protect you. But for not trusting you with the truth.
You asked for honesty, and I failed to give that to you.
I broke your trust in me. And the worst part is I told myself it was for love. "
She's quiet beside me, but when I turn my gaze to hers I see the glimmer of fire and irritation in her eyes.
"I watched what silence did to my mother.
I built my entire life around making sure no one I loved would ever be trapped by what they didn't know.
" I turn to face her. Her profile is sharp in the dawn light, her jaw set, her bare lips pressed together.
"And then I trapped you in exactly the same way. "
I reach across the gap and twine my fingers through hers, not letting her pull away.
The second she rebuilds the wall around her heart, I’m out for good. No one will get past her shields. I can’t let her pull away and hide herself from me. That can make me the biggest bastard she knows, but add the insult to the growing pile I already have.
The tension in my body eases enough to where I don’t feel like my heart is going to implode any second.
"You are the bravest person I have ever known, Sloane Whitmore.
You walked into Club Genesis alone. You sat across from Harlon Constantine and dismantled a contract with evidence I should have given you weeks ago.
You drove to Lorenzo's territory and you stood over him with a weapon in your hands and you chose to let him live.
I would have ended him which says a lot about your strong character. "
I don’t try to hide the emotions filtering through my words. "You did what she couldn't do for herself, Sloane.”
Another truth can’t be ignored either.
“You saved yourself. You didn’t wait for someone else to step in and play your shining knight. That took tremendous strength."
Her chin trembles. Her lips part on a breath that visibly stutters in her chest and her hand tightens around mine so hard I feel her pulse hammering against my fingers.
Her eyes fill slowly, the blue brightening with moisture, and she blinks and the tears hold, clinging to her lower lashes, refusing to fall.