“I mean...a few weeks ago when your live video went viral, our algorithms kicked in. The most popular videos of the day are posted on my direct feed so I can check out why a certain topic has hit the public so profoundly.” Tony shook his head at me as if he couldn’t believe it. “And that’s how I ‘met’ Kas. A long-haired, bearded bear who looked into the camera with so much pain, so much wariness, so much distrust. I remembered that look. I remembered his name and—” His tears started again. He ran both hands over his face, forcing himself to finish. “And when my daughter came home with that very same look in her eyes and the countless scars on her beautiful body, there was one scar that didn’t look like the others. It was black with lead instead of silver from age. It looked...deliberate. It made me fucking sick to think some bastard had autographed my child. That he’d hurt her then signed the very pain he’d given her. But she...” He blew out a harsh breath, glowering at the crowd and the insensitive cell phones recording such a private, agonizing moment. “She told me it was self-inflicted. That she’d sat in the dark with her older brother and dragged a sharp pencil over her forearm. He’d told her to stop. But she’d added his name instead. She said it was the only thing that gave her comfort. The name of the boy she loved, inked into her skin, a hero who did what he could to protect her.”

For a second, my mind was blank.

But then it detonated with images. Of memories. Of sitting on our beds, drawing blood with a pencil, imprinting wounds on a body already riddled with them.

“We have to stop. It’s too addictive.”

“I know, Kas. Just...one more.”

And I’d let her.

She’d drawn a K and then an A, finishing it off with an S.

I’d felt so protective of her, so in love with her, so damn afraid that I would let her down after she’d just called me her hero.

Bile rushed up my throat.

Fuck.

Fucking...

I’m going to be sick.

Motherfucking sick.

I stumbled backward, clutching onto the bar.

Tony came closer, crowding me, crushing me. “I don’t know the extent of what went on in that place, but you were there for my daughter when I couldn’t be.” Tony choked on a sob, his arms reaching for me. “You were there to hold her, soothe her. She told me that for the first part of her imprisonment, you did your very best to save her from—”

My ears roared, blocking him out.

Whiteness gathered on my vision.

My head pounded.

My knees tried to give way. “You-your daughter...” I blinked, trying to see Tony through all the fucking white. “What’s...what’s her name?”

I knew.

I fucking knew.

Jareth.

He’d done it.

He’d found one of our sisters.

He’d—

“Her name is Isabella. Isabella Creed.” He fell on me, wrapping his arms around me in a fierce embrace, making my head disintegrate, my heart annihilate, and every part of me threaten to explode. “But I think you knew her as Quell.”

Holy shit—

The room pressed in.

Panic clawed.

“God, Kas. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you did.” His arms tightened around me. His hot body pressed to mine. His clinginess. His passion. He pulled me even closer, his thigh going between mine, rubbing against my cock. “Thank you. Thank you so—”

I lost it.

I snarled.

I shoved him.

I leaped over him even as he fell to the floor.

I bulldozed through men in tuxes and women in dresses.

All of them.

So fucking naïve. So pretentious. So self-absorbed.

None of them cared that Jareth had freed someone we both loved. Someone I’d rocked to sleep after the bastards had used her. Someone who I’d wiped away her blood as she cried in my arms. Someone who’d spent eighteen goddamn miserable years being a toy to absolute cunts.

And for eleven years, I wasn’t there to save her.

Quell had always been a favorite. She’d always had an angelic grace that the bastards wanted to stamp out.

Without me there to take some of her punishments...

Oh, fuck—

I retched.

Vodka splashed on my shoes.

Eyes watched me.

Men whispered.

Women gossiped.

And I couldn’t do it anymore.

I kept running.

Running.

Motherfucking running.

Out the door, through the night, away from everything.

OceanofPDF.com

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OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“I’M SO, SO SORRY, Gemma. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Tony’s millionth apology set my teeth on edge. For four hours, we’d searched for Kas, driving from the expensive hotel on the outskirts of town where the gala was held through streets, shopping districts, and parks.

An hour or so into the search, I’d found a pair of discarded dress shoes, kicked off in the middle of the street with a pair of black socks not far away, as if the man wearing them was shedding the unfamiliar and returning to what he was.

An animal who might never fit in with humans.

I sighed and rubbed my eyes, not caring about smearing my makeup at this point. My hair was a mess, and my mascara had long since run down my cheeks from all my crying. I was exhausted—mentally and physically—but I couldn’t rest until Kas was found.

God, please let him be okay.

Tony sat beside me on the curb outside the hotel where the gala had been dispersed. We were the only ones left. Others had offered to help search. Those who’d recorded the interaction between Tony and Kas tried to offer opinions on what’d happened. While others lurked around for the hell of it.

Tony had been the one to get rid of them all, and he’d not left my side since, patrolling the hotel grounds before taking me around town in his SUV, unsuccessfully hunting Kas.

We’d gone everywhere we could think of. We’d estimated how far Kas could’ve run.

And now, we had no other plans. Slumped and weary, we were left wondering how the night had gone so wrong.

Slouching over his knees, Tony sank his hands through his salt and pepper hair. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I hugged him. I know how flighty recovering victims are. I’ve tried to hug Isabella, only to understand that having a man in her personal space is the last thing she needs—even if I am her father.”

Tony irked me using the words flighty and victims.

They weren’t flighty—they were wary. And they weren’t victims—they’re survivors.

But I appreciated his heart was in the right place, and he’d had a rough time the past month, too. Patting his knee, I smiled sadly as his tears came again. “I’m truly so sorry, Gemma. I’ve made this so much worse.”

“Enough apologies, Tony. Go home to your wife and daughter.”

He shook his head quickly. “No way. I’ll help you find Kas. It’s my fault he ran off. I should never have opened my big mouth. I hadn’t planned on saying any of that. It just...” He shrugged with a heartbreaking sniff. “I wasn’t prepared for the level of gratitude I’d feel when I met him. Knowing he looked after my little girl. Hearing from her own lips that Kas took most of the rapes—” He choked and wiped his mouth. “Fucking hell, I want to kill them all.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll get what’s coming to them.” My voice was icy with knowledge and pride. I couldn’t tell Tony that the men and women who’d hurt Quell—I mean Isabella—when she was with Kas were now just a pile of forgotten bones, and I definitely couldn’t tell him that the more recent perpetrators were most likely strewn across some expensive carpet with their throats slit and entrails yanked out if Jareth had been the one to save her.