Run (25 page)

“Why? You’ve got money. You’re an important person. Why her? You can have anyone you want. Why can’t you just leave her alone?”

“I just can’t, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because I love her!” he roared.

Lane dropped his fists and stepped back as if he was just hit.

“You can’t love her.” The older man shook his head vehemently from side to side.

“Why?”

“Someone like you isn’t capable of it.”

Dare laughed humorlessly. “Well, I guess you need to have a chat with my heart.”

“Boy, just because you have this imaginary idea of what love is, doesn’t mean you’re in love. If you loved her, you’d do everything in your power to make her happy.”

“I do…I’ve tried—”

Lane snorted. “Yeah? By giving her those fancy clothes and jewels? Material things aren’t happiness, O’Shaughnessy. If you really want to make her happy, you’d let her go. That’s what she wants.”

“And she told you that?”

Lane narrowed his eyes and nodded. “Yes. Every day, she tells me how much she hates being with you. And the only reason why she hasn’t run away is because she’s scared you might have me thrown in prison, again.”

The heart that Dare had only discovered he had in the last few weeks was now breaking into a million pieces.

“Aya, would you mind coming with me, please?” Dare asked after dinner. Their meal had been silent and awkward as had been the last few evenings since his return. Macy had declined to dine with them tonight claiming a headache but Aya had a sneaking suspicion her friend didn’t want to have another night of tension as she dined.

When Dare had returned, Aya hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he was different, polite but distant. He didn’t touch her and in fact, had her clothing returned to her old room. For the most part he wasn’t home, only coming home during dinner. Other than that, it was like he didn’t live there.

She hadn’t even asked him how he was doing because his demeanor didn’t invite conversation. Aya felt like an uninvited guest in his home, waiting for something, anything to happen. This was the first night, since he’d been home that he’d said more than a few words to her.

Aya placed her napkin aside and stood up. “Sure.” She followed him through the house and stopped as he headed down the dreaded wing, it was the one she’d avoided since the accident. “We’re not going in there, are we?”

He turned and held his hand out to her. “Please. I promise, I won’t hand you a weapon. That is unless you want one.”

Aya looked at his hand hesitantly. As Dare was about to withdraw it, she grabbed it. He raised his brows as if he didn’t expect her to do that. “Trust me, I never want to pick up another weapon for as long as I live.”

“Never say never, Aya. You’ll never know when you’ll need to.” He led her to the room, but as she came to the threshold she halted.

“Please don’t make me go in there.”

“Aya, it’s okay.”

“No. I can’t do it. Please.” Her heart started to pound erratically as panic set in.

“I know I’ve never given you reason to, but trust me. Okay? If you need to, close your eyes and I’ll lead you in there.”

“Why is it so important for you to go into that room?”

“It just is. We—I can’t move forward until I do this, and I don’t think you’ll be able to either.”

She bit the inside of her lip and finally nodded. Aya squeezed her eyes shut as he pulled her into the room.

“Open your eyes, Aya.”

She shook her head.

“Just a peek.”

Aya opened one lid halfway and then she opened both eyes fully. A gasp escaped her lips. The walls that had once been covered with every weapon imaginable were now bare. The entire room was empty save a chair in the center. “What happened?”

“They’re gone. I had the staff pack them up. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them. Maybe create a museum of some sort or just keep them in storage.”

She moistened her now dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “But you…why? You said yourself you’ve been collecting them for years.”

Dare shrugged. “Because they no longer matter. They used to represent something I no longer believe in.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Have a seat, Aya. If nothing else, you’re owed some sort of an explanation and I only ask that you don’t interrupt because I’ve never had the courage to share what I’m about to with anyone, not even Foster. And, I don’t think I’ll have the courage to ever speak of it again.”

Aya licked her lips again. “Sounds ominous.” She walked over to the chair and took a seat.

Dare pressed his back against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Most people would think I’ve lead a charmed life and I won’t lie, I have it better than most but when I was growing up, I would have traded it all to be anyone else. To say my father was tough, would have been the understatement of the century. He had a strong set of ideals about the lower class and why they couldn’t better their circumstances. He hated anything and anyone he perceived as weak and did everything he could to stamp it out. I was one of those things.”

His pain-laced words touched her, yet Aya feared she hadn’t heard the worst. She wanted to get up and offer him comfort, but she kept her hands folded in her lap because she was unsure of how he’d react.

“I wasn’t allowed to be educated outside the home because he didn’t think the other kids were good enough for me to be around. He programmed me from an early age to look down on other people who didn’t come from the same circumstances or even thought like us. Foster was my only friend because his father and mine were close business associates. But even Foster didn’t like to come around, too often, because my father wasn’t the kind of man whose company one enjoyed. His favorite pastime was making people uncomfortable and exploiting what he considered their weaknesses.”

“Like how?” Aya asked, unable to help herself.

Dare raised a brow.

“Sorry.”

He sighed. “It’s okay.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “We once had dinner guests over, keep in mind all the people in attendance were business associates and their wives or companions. Well, there was one man whose business was on the brink of collapse, but not many people were aware of it, apparently. You see, my father had bought up several of the man’s businesses. So at the party, he bragged about it and he went on about how the man was incompetent and all the many reasons why his businesses failed. He mocked the man right down to the clothes he was wearing. The guy was so embarrassed, he made his excuses and he and his wife left. But that wasn’t all. Dad couldn’t leave well enough alone after that. He felt slighted because the man dared to leave his dinner early, so he had the banks call in all of the guy’s loans. It ruined him. All his assets were sold off and the guy was left penniless. But that wasn’t enough. My father took the man’s wife as a lover. But when he was through using her, he discarded her, too.”

“Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? That’s one of his nicer stories. My father reveled in destroying lives. I guess that’s where I got it from.” He laughed without humor. “As I was saying, he wanted to make sure I was strong, and not weak like everyone else. He wanted me to be like him, and he kept me in line however he saw fit, be it with his fists or by taking things away from me. He caught on pretty soon that taking things from me was more effective than getting physical with me.”

Aya couldn’t help but interrupt again, after a long pause. “What did he take?”

“Everything. Anything that mattered to me, he took. As a matter of fact, he loved giving me things so he could take them away. I had these dogs, big dogs, three of them. They were some new designer breed that I can’t remember the name of but I loved them. At one point, they were probably the best thing in my life.”

“But, he took them away from you?”

“You could say that. Remember I was telling you how he wasn’t pleased about me dancing with the staff?”

She nodded.

“One of my punishments for that transgression was to watch him snap their necks one at a time and if I turned away, he promised he’d cut them up and have the chef serve them to me for dinner. And as extreme as that sounds, he would have done exactly that.”

“That’s awful.”

Again, he shrugged as if it was nothing. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him as a child to witness something like that. “Anyway,” Dare continued, “That’s when I started my weapons collection. It was the one and only thing he actually approved of because he deemed it manly. But what he didn’t know is that with each weapon I collected, I imagined killing him with it. I’d learn about each weapon and how to use it and I’d fantasize for hours about using it on him. I particularly thought about the knives and how I wanted to plant a blade in his forehead. My collection at times was the only thing that helped me hang on to my sanity. But, the time had finally come when I was tired of his shit. I was the strong one. I was bigger and smarter and better than him and I intended to prove it sooner or later.”

“I think my father also noticed his bullying no longer had the same effect on me. You see, by now, with my education complete, I’d started working in his company and taking on a great deal of responsibility. The employees were beginning to defer to me. My father would often try to undermine any decision I made even to the detriment of the company because he couldn’t stand to see me come out on top over him. He wasn’t ready to relinquish the title of Alpha.”

“The problem was, people were starting to whisper behind his back. His behavior was growing erratic, even in public. He was starting to reveal the side of himself he’d only saved for me. One night, I was fed up with him and we argued and that’s when he taunted me about my mother. He told me what happened to her, how she’d been having an affair with a staff member, a Dreg, he’d said. He, then, told me how he enjoyed strangling her. And then, I remembered. I was so young, I’d forgotten. I saw my father standing over my mother’s body when I couldn’t have been more than two or three. All those years, I thought my mother had just left and there was always this mystery surrounding her disappearance. But, it was him. He’d killed her and discarded her body.”

“His taunts had unlocked that memory and I snapped. I was going to kill him right then. I punched him as hard as I could and he punched me back but I was too angry to feel it. We fought and I got the best of him. And, I think that’s when he lost it. He kicked me in the stomach and then, ran away. I chased him, but he made it to his office and reached in his desk. He had one of my blades. He must have taken it from my collection. And then as if it was nothing, he took that blade and slid it across his throat. There was blood everywhere. He was dead before he hit the floor. That bastard, fucking screwed me even in his death.”

Dare turned to face the wall and slammed his fist against it, making Aya jump. “That fucker took everything from me.” He punched the wall again. “He took away any chance of a happy childhood, my mother, and he even took my revenge. He wouldn’t even allow me that because he was a goddamn coward.” This time when he slammed his fist against the wall, Aya heard a crack.

“Dare!” she stood up and rushed over to him. “Stop! Don’t do that, please!”

He seemed unaware that he’d probably just broken his hand, most likely because of an adrenaline rush. She wrapped her arms him and attempted to pull him away from the wall. He wouldn’t budge but he stopped hitting the wall. With a deep sigh, he placed his forehead against the wall. Aya didn’t let go. She just held him, wanting to give him the comfort he needed. He’d carried so much pain with him all these years and she hurt for him as if it had happened to her. A tear slid down her cheek. “I’m so sorry Dare. But you have to know, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Maybe not, but you know what the irony is? I had a read-out on his chip to figure out some clue as to why that son of a bitch was so damn evil. Turns out he’d been battling mental illness for years. He stopped taking his medication around the time his behavior became erratic. I had a conversation with my father’s private physician. According to him, my father thought the medication made him weak.  So there you have it, he was so scared of being weak himself, he projected all his crazy on to me. And all this time, I’ve been fighting being just like him when I’ve been like him all along. And, it took you to make me realize that.”

Aya pressed her head against his back. “No. You’re not like him.”

Dare extricated himself from her arms and turned around. There was sadness in his green gaze and it broke her heart. “I’m exactly like him. I was a fool to think I could make amends with you, but I tried. When I found out about your uncle, I felt guilt that I didn’t think I was capable of feeling. That’s why I made you shoot me. I wasn’t going to deny you the revenge my father denied me.”

“But, I didn’t want to do it. I hated seeing you like that,” Aya whispered.

“It was what I had coming. My penance was to take that bullet…and to let you go.”

“What?”

“I fought so hard to keep you when I had no right to take you in the first place.”

Freedom.

It was what she’d wanted all along but now that it was being presented to her, she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She’d never been so confused about her feelings in her life. “You’re…you’re letting me go?”