I rushed into the living room, nearly tripping over the wineglass I’d left on the floor last night. “Shit.” I’d slept in, like really late. Raul was a good boss, the best, but I was due on stage in thirty minutes and he’d be pissed if he had to find a replacement last minute.
I winced. The hangover wasn’t helping. I’d polished off the bottle of red and opened another in an attempt to get some peace. Not something I usually did, but last night had felt like a bottle-and-a-half kind of night. This was going to be a long-ass day.
Slinging my bag over my shoulder, my costume changes draped over my arm, I grabbed my makeup case, swiped the keys off the table, and yanked the door open.
I stumbled to a stop, almost standing on something on the floor just outside. I blinked down at it, unable to process what I was seeing for a moment, then sucked in a harsh breath through my nose when my brain finally caught up.
A single yellow rose.
My chin jerked up and I scanned the hall, heart thumping like mad behind my ribs.
“Here, baby, I got you this,” Ryan said, one perfect yellow rose clutched in his hand. “You look amazing.”
I looked down at my prom dress and blushed. I felt amazing. I took the rose from him, beaming into his gorgeous blue eyes. How had I gotten so lucky?
The memory slammed through my mind and I grabbed for the doorframe when my legs felt close to buckling under me.
Later that night he’d gotten jealous because Brad Everly had talked to me while he was in the bathroom. He’d shoved me up against the wall when he finally had me alone, and had squeezed my arm so tight it left a bruise. He’d apologized the next day. He’d even cried. I naïvely thought his jealousy meant he loved me, that he was just scared of losing me, that he’d never really hurt me.
I lifted the back of my hand to my lips, fingers trembling so hard I almost dropped the keys I was holding. Something poked out from under it—a small card. I picked it up and flipped it over.
Missed you.
He’d found me.
I was going to be sick.
God, what if he was still there? I yanked my apartment door closed and ran down the hall, pounding on the button for the elevator over and over. “Come on.” I had to get out of there.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
It finally slid open and I shrieked at the tall figure standing on the other side.
“Whoa. You okay, honey?” Mr. Kelley asked, his bushy gray brows lowered in concern.
I rushed in, forcing a smile that wasn’t convincing anyone. “Sorry. I was a million miles away.”
He chuckled and shuffled past me down the hall toward his place. The doors slid closed and I slumped back against the wall.
Ryan had been here. He’d been here more than once. He’d been right outside my apartment while I’d been inside. While I slept. One hard kick and he could have gotten to me…
He could have finished what he’d started.
I was on autopilot by the time I got to Stilettos, but the numbness I’d gotten so used to wasn’t there, not anymore. This was something else. I was so past terrified I was pretty sure I’d gone into shock. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think straight. I wasn’t sure how I was putting one foot in front of the other.
My shift started, and I did what I usually did: I danced and I talked to customers. I pretended that I wasn’t shattering, that with every moment that past I wasn’t breaking apart bit by bit. That all the work I’d done over the last twelve months wasn’t unraveling.
The shield was slipping away, revealing inch by broken inch. I felt like the whole club was looking at me, seeing me for the first time—the real me, the weak, battered shell I’d been when I woke up in that hospital bed, surprised I was still alive.
I could call the police. Take out a restraining order.
That wouldn’t stop him.
No, it wouldn’t, and I didn’t even have any proof it was him. A box of chocolates, a rose, a single note. I hadn’t actually seen him. Nothing the police would take seriously.
“You’re up after Liz,” Josie said when she walked by.
I smiled and nodded like everything was okay, like I was fine, and headed to the dressing rooms to do a quick change while Liz finished up her dance. I missed Willa. She used to dance here at the club, and I missed having her around. We’d somehow become friends. After she left and opened her own hair salon, I decided to do something I hadn’t in a long time, and reached out to her. We talked all the time now.
I could call her. Her man was a private investigator at The King Agency, an ex-cop. He’d know what to do. Willa would let me stay with her. She’d do whatever she could to help me. But the thought of leading Ryan to their door, into their lives—I couldn’t do that to her. Willa had her kid to think of.
And honestly, I didn’t know how to do it, how to reach out, to ask for help. Keeping secrets was ingrained in me. Ryan taught me that; pounded it into me with his fists over and over again.
Ryan doesn’t control you anymore.
A shudder moved through me as I walked backstage and waited for my turn. I loved dancing. I’d danced while I was with Ryan as well. He liked the money. And it was the only place I’d felt free, alive. The only place I had any real control. When it was my turn, I did what I always did; I let the music flow through me, tried to lose myself. I needed it, more than I had in a very long time.
But I couldn’t find my escape on that stage, no matter how hard I tried.
My body was covered in scars, most of which I could cover with makeup and strategically designed costumes. The lighting helped as well. But tonight I felt naked, stripped of the props I used to hide behind, and I was shaking so hard by the end of the song I wasn’t sure how I walked in a straight line.
As soon as I walked off, I rushed back to the dressing room, waiting for someone to ask if I was okay and why I was freaking out.
No one came. No one asked.
I’d been doing such a great job of hiding, of concealing my emotions, my pain, for such a long time, I was still doing it without even realizing it. Ryan had trained me well.
All this time I thought I was so strong, that I’d broken free, escaped him. I’d been wrong.
He’d been here with me the whole time, in my head, under my skin.
I finished my shift and one of the bouncers waved me down a cab.
“Where to?” the guy asked when I climbed in. I rattled off my address and stared blindly out the window.
My phone beeped, alerting me to a text, and I knew who it was before I even looked at the screen and saw the unknown number.
I liked watching you dance tonight.
He’d been there, at Stilettos. Somewhere in the crowd.
My stomach churned and my skin crawled.
Despite his jealousy, Ryan had liked to watch me dance. I started when I was saving for college. Ryan hadn’t let me go in the end. The money I could make had been more important to him. He’d make sure everyone knew I was his, and then when I got home he’d punish me for flirting with the customers. The accusations and insults, the anger.
“I saw you looking at that asshole.”
“You let him touch you.”
“You wanted to fuck him.”
The cab pulled up outside my apartment, and I stared up at my windows on the fifth floor. He was probably there now, waiting for me. If he wasn’t already there, he’d come for me soon.
Tomorrow.
Next week.
He always did like dragging it out, my fear, the dread of what was coming.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to keep my breathing steady. I curled my fingers into tight fists, letting my nails sink into my flesh. He wasn’t going to hurt me, not anymore. I wasn’t going to let him.
“You going in, lady?” the driver asked.
I shook my head. “No, I…I’ve changed my mind.”
“You wanna give me an address, then? I can’t read your mind.”
My heart pounded and I let the bite of pain against my palm steady me as I gave him the address I’d memorized. There was only one place I could go. One person who could help me. After the way we’d left things, though, I just hoped he didn’t turn me away.
The windows were dark when the cab pulled up outside Tomas’s townhouse. I knew his address because he’d given it to me. Tomas didn’t give his address to many people. Maybe he was out. Maybe he wasn’t even in the city.
I should have called, I should have…
I bit my lip and squeezed my eyes closed.
God, what he must think of me.
I paid the cab driver and, on shaky legs, took the stairs to the brownstone’s front door. If Tomas wasn’t there, I didn’t know what I’d do. My hand trembled as I lifted it, forcing myself to ring the bell. Nothing happened for several minutes, then a voice came at me through a speaker by the door. “Yes?”
“Is Tomas in?”
“Can I have your name, please?”
“Stephanie…Stephanie Gable.”
The sound of locks sliding came through the heavy wooden barrier, and the door opened. A man with gray hair and weathered skin, dressed in red and blue checked pajamas, brown leather slippers, and a navy-blue robe stood there blinking at me.
I looked beyond him to the grand-looking foyer behind him, then back. “I…I think I have the wrong house.”
He smiled gently and opened the door wider. “You’re at the right place,” he said. “Please, come in.”
I followed him inside. The entryway was big, open, with black and white tiles on the floor. There wasn’t much else filling the space besides several paintings on the walls and a black lacquer side table just inside the door with some kind of figuring sitting on it.
He motioned toward a door to the left, dark and glossy. “You can wait in here while I get Mr. Mendoza for you—”
“No need,” a rough voice said.
I spun around in time to see Tomas descend a curving staircase, and froze in place.
He was wearing a pair of black cotton pajama bottoms, low on his hips, and nothing else. His feet and everything from the waist up were bare.
My gaze moved over his incredibly ripped upper body, hard and sculpted, abs like I’d never seen before, and nearly all of it—what I could see anyway—was covered in ink. My gaze traveled to the tattoos on his chest and arms and on one side of his stomach, following it down to the deep V that disappeared below those PJ bottoms.
“Stephanie?” he said again in that rough, no-nonsense voice, so deep and gritty I felt it vibrate through me.
The gray-haired man seemed to vanish without a word, leaving Tomas and I alone, and suddenly I felt tongue-tied. I didn’t know what to say, where to start. Humiliation burned my cheeks.
Tomas had seen me at my lowest. He knew Ryan had hurt me, and that I’d stayed until the day he’d almost killed me. How could he not see me as some…some pathetic creature?
Especially, when that was how I saw myself.
Now I was there asking for his help again, exposing the most vulnerable parts of myself.
I couldn’t meet his eyes.
He moved closer, coming to a stop in front of me.
I still hadn’t answered and kept my eyes downcast—my stomach roiled—just like I used to with Ryan. I wasn’t afraid of Tomas, though, I was ashamed. Ashamed of the woman I’d been, of the woman I apparently still was.
God, I thought she was gone. Now Tomas was seeing her all over again.
Rough-skinned fingers gently, so gently, slid under my chin, tilting my head back. I still couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Talk to me,” he said, voice even rougher, deeper.
For a moment, time flashed back to that night, me sitting in Tomas’s car the first time he’d rescued me from Ryan, and dammit, I wished that I could go back, that I could change everything, that I’d never gotten out of his car when he took me home.
I blinked and a tear streaked down my cheek.
“Fuck, Stephanie, what’s going on?” he said more urgently.
I could feel his gaze, those intense, almost black eyes searching my face, searching for answers. “Christ, Angel, fucking look at me.”
Angel.
My eyes shot to his, the endearment striking something deep in the heart of me, something untapped, something hidden.
He flinched at whatever he saw in my eyes. “Tell me,” he rasped.
I blinked again and another tear burned a path down my cheeks. “He’s back, Tomas.”
His jaw hardened. “Who? Who’s back?”
He knew who I was talking about. He had to. He was asking me to confirm it.
“Ryan,” I whispered. “He’s come back. He’s come back for me.”