Chapter Nine
The crowd falls quiet, attuned to us in a matter of seconds.
Not because he spoke to me. That earned me resentful glances or mild curiosity. What brings the room to a halt is my disobedience, as if I’ve disrupted the entire flow of the party by fighting back. The beat of the music still thrums around us, heavy vibrations on the taut crowd.
I can hear the jangle of iron chains from someone shackled to the corner, eyelids heavy as they watch me, hips still thrust upward in a gyration never completed. I can hear the slick sound of skin against skin as the tangle on the fallen-over armchair twist to look at me. A cold giggle from one of the girls who’d been dancing near Damon before he came over.
God, even the silence here is hedonistic and cruel.
“I’m listening,” he says, cool and sharp as a blade.
He listens with his whole body, his tall frame relaxed and expectant, his eyes hooded. The rest of the room is listening, too. This is better entertainment than half-naked people dancing in a cage. Than people having sex in a fallen-over leather armchair. This is the show.
“Well,” Damon says in that showman’s voice. As if he’s the ringmaster, the Den his human circus. “If you have something to say, go ahead and say it. We can’t wait to hear.”
Every pair of eyes in the Den swings looks at me. I can smell the sex and the sweat in the air, feel the heavy breathing from all around. “I’d like to talk in private.”
“Would you?” Damon says, circling me. “You don’t look like you have much to bargain with.”
I’m painfully aware of my slouchy travel clothes, my old ballet flats, the frayed carry-on that I found at a thrift store for five dollars. His dark eyes take me in, all of me, from my appearance to my worry, the fear that I’ve lived in since I woke up in Avery’s empty bed days ago.
“It’s a serious matter,” I say, proud that my voice doesn’t waver. There are a hundred people looking at me right now, each one of them more experienced than me.
And then there’s Damon himself, their dark king. Benevolent. Capricious.
Both a powerful leader and the disruptive force.
His voice is mocking now. “A serious matter? You better tell me fast, then.”
There aren’t any words in my head. All the things I’d planned to say to him—where’s my father? Where’s Avery? What have you done to them?—evaporated in the face of his scorching derision.
“Have you lost a puppy, little girl?” A laugh spreads through the crowd, as tactile as the groping hands and shining skin that undulated to the music minutes ago. “Or maybe you are the lost little puppy. Have you lost your owner?”
The worst part is that his words make me feel like a lost animal, wandering the streets, desperate for someone to take me in. With my father’s empty apartment fresh in my memory and my second-hand luggage, it’s not very far from the truth.
I look around at the people gawking, at their delight in my discomfort. They think they know what Damon Scott will do. They think they know him, but I knew the boy before he became a man. I saw him lanky and determined. I watched him trade his own safety to protect me.
“Where’s my dad?”
That earns me a small smile, his lids low. “Does he tell you about his day when he calls you? About threatening people for money? About following through?”
Acid burns my throat, because Daddy never mentions that. And I’m not naive enough to think it hasn’t happened. When I’m in at one of the best colleges in the country, while I live in that dreamworld of numbers and Greek symbols, he’s doing dirty work for a dangerous criminal king.
“So where is he now?”
An indolent shrug of one shoulder. “I haven’t seen him. Though I did hear through the grapevine that he started gambling again.” He makes a tsk sound. “That’s never a good thing. Once debts start to pile up, how can I trust him to be loyal? I can’t.”
My blood runs cold. “Did you do something to him?”
“Let’s be clear, sweetheart. Whatever happened to him, he did it to himself.” The cold silver of his eyes tells me Damon’s conscience would not ache for even one second over my father’s death.
“You asshole,” I hiss, unable to hide my anger any longer.
A man steps forward, someone I’ve never seen before. He’s wearing a suit that’s been undone in most of the ways it can be, rumpled and pushed aside. I barely have time to register his aggression, his instinctive response to my insult. How does a man obtain that kind of blind loyalty?
The man reaches for me, his fingers brushing my wrist.
That’s how close he gets before everything shatters. Damon moves so fast he’s a blur. When he stills, he has the man pressed against the wall, arm twisted at a strange angle.
“No one touches her.” Damon’s voice is quiet, but it carries through the crowded hall.
A rustle moves through the crowd, half awareness, half movement. The way they look at me has changed, the hostility faded away, replaced by something else. Maybe deference. Or fear.
I’m under Damon Scott’s protection now. That’s what he’s just made clear.
He steps away from the man, leaving him writhing in pain against the wall.
“I didn’t kill your father,” he says, his voice low enough to be private. What I requested before, if not quite the way I wanted. “I haven’t seen him in weeks. He’s not here.”
It’s a dismissal, one that I should be grateful for. And if it were only my father, I would leave. I would search the old gambling spots where he used to lose his paychecks. I would find new ones.
Except it’s not only my father at stake here.
“What about Avery?”
Damon Scott doesn’t suck in a breath. He doesn’t widen his eyes or make any kind of movement that might be perceived as weakness. He had those reactions beaten out of him a long time ago. There’s only a blade where a man might have stood, cool and silver and sharp. “What about her?”
“She’s your sister. Don’t you care that she’s missing?”
“How long?”
I know Avery said Gabriel and Damon had a falling out, but how could they not have spoken about this? They were business partners once. Friends in that way that only predators could be, more of a truce and a reserved respect than actual affection. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you.”
“How long?” he repeats, his voice even.
“Seven days.” My heart clenches hard as I say the words aloud. The reality of the situation sinks in more in that moment than before. I can no longer imagine this is a dream. No longer hope she’s pulling some extended surprise vacation. This is happening. “We talked to the police. To campus security. It’s like she vanished. Gabriel flew there that day and tore the place apart. He’s still there, looking.”
And he isn’t sleeping or eating. He looks like a tornado hit him.
For a while I stayed there, too, hoping we’d find her on campus or in the Emerald. Only when it became clear that she wasn’t anywhere did I have to leave. And I felt a pull toward Tanglewood, as if the answers would be here.
Is it a coincidence that my father and Avery went missing so close together? They really have nothing in common, except for me. In that way they’re parts of the same puzzle. Variables in the same equation. I have to solve this. That’s the only way to bring them back. It’s the only way to find them both. The only way to make sure I don’t disappear as well.