OWN HER: A Dark Mafia Romance(184)

In reality, I was supposed to be dead.



I didn’t lie down. I just sat at the edge of one of the bed and stared at the hardwood floor under my feet. The room didn’t feel real anymore. Nothing did. Everything was so quiet all of a sudden. None of the energy I normally felt in this place was present. There was no excitement, no sexual tension, no intrigue. It was quiet in every sense.



I stared at the door and waited for Cole to come up, prayed for Cole to come up. I needed something I knew was real beyond a shadow of a doubt. I had to have something to cling to until I could find my way back to the real world from wherever my brain and heart had gone after the shootings last night.



Andre hadn’t even come up to check on me, and he was usually my caretaker in this place. He was the one who got stuck babysitting. I wasn’t going to run this time. I wasn’t going to pull one over on him again. I had to admit, though, it had been pretty funny fooling that gullible kid.



I laughed to myself, bringing back some of my energy to the room. It felt good to laugh. I started really laughing. It wasn’t that pulling one over on Andre had been that funny. It was amusing, but it wasn’t hilarious. I was cackling. My body and soul needed the release, and I gave into it, realizing that it was either laughing or crying.



Or both, as my hysterical laughter turned to sobs. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed, letting out all of the fear, and anger, and sorrow, and fucking disappointment that had been growing for far longer than the last twenty-four hours. The disappointment had been there for years, I realized, ever since my friends from school went off to college and I walked away from my home to live on the street.



So many things had gone wrong to lead me there. I didn’t even know where it started anymore. I just knew that it was okay to cry now because I was finally at the end of it. Finally, after all the years of physical and emotional self-abuse just to try to make a life out of what I was doing, I could let it all go.



It was fitting, I thought, that I was letting it go by myself, alone, in a strange room in a strange building, where a man I had just met was handling his criminal organization downstairs while I poured my emotions out into my hands and onto his floor. Some things would never change. My independence was one of them, and that had probably been the main thing that had led me out of the house and into the streets.



I wondered if I was going to be giving up my independence by letting Cole take me out of this life. It was a strange, sudden thought to appear in my head. Was I settling by letting him take care of me? Was I going to be missing out on anything? Was my past suddenly going to be in vain?



God, I wished he would come through that door. I needed to run my concerns by him. I needed to know that everything was okay. I needed to know that I was still here and not stuck in some purgatory somewhere waiting on the rest of my life to begin even though it never would.



My head was all kinds of jacked up. Cole represented something solid and grounded that I could wrap my head around, putting everything else back in place for me.



“Hey, everything okay up…” Cole started as he poked his head in the room, stopping himself when he saw what I was wearing. “You didn’t bring any clothes.”



“Yes, and no,” I told him, laughing again. This time it was a real laugh, a healthy laugh.



“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” he said tenderly as he came into the room and closed the door behind him.



I could see in his green eyes that he was troubled despite his attempt at covering it up. It must have been hard to break that kind of news to that many people at once, but when MC members didn’t come home, it made sense that there would be questions.



He sat down on the bed and took me in his arms, pulling me against his chest.



“I’m sorry,” he said above me. “I’m sorry for using you to get to Fang, and I’m sorry that things went the way they did last night.”



I touched a finger to his lips.



“No, you were right the whole time. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m sorry I alerted Fang to your plan to approach him at his hideout. I should have let you go through with that, without expecting anything different from what you were planning on doing anyway. He was going to kill me, Cole,” I told him.



“I know. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”



“I saw that when three more men in black suits hopped out of his car to pick me up at your apartment, but by then it was too late. And he told me all about his plan to murder me once he got me to the cabin,” I explained to him.



“I’m sorry, Sasha,” Cole said, and I could feel his sympathy in the way he held me. “The reason we followed you was so that he wouldn’t have the chance to do it. It was pretty obvious when he sent them after you at the park that he was going to try to kill you. I couldn’t let that happen.”