Chapter 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DANIELA

"Ugh," Morgan groaned as she walked back over to the couch with a freshly popped bowl of popcorn. "That freak actually sent him lingerie? And told him she wanted him to tear it off her and fuck her? That's just…ugh."

She gave an exaggerated shudder as she plopped down next to me and grabbed the remote control, pulling up Bridgerton on Netflix.

I'd decided to give Lina the day off today since she'd put in so many extra hours this past week, and given that she was already getting a bunch of overtime on this paycheck, she'd been grateful for it and told me to call if I needed her over the weekend. Not that I planned on it. I sorely needed some quality time with my little man.

And I needed the girls' day with my bestie before I went out tonight too. Morgan and I were currently lounging around in our pajamas with a bunch of junk food, and then she was going to watch Isaac for me tonight while I went out with Braden.

"Right?" I agreed. "I'm thoroughly creeped out, and I never even saw the damn thing."

But as unnerving as the…um… gift that had landed on Braden's doorstep yesterday was, that wasn't what had me tied up in knots right now. What had kept me awake, tossing and turning for most of the night.

No, it was the way he'd acted in the immediate aftermath. It was the way his first instinct in the middle of an anxiety attack hadn't been to call his PI or one of the detectives working on his case, or even to dial 911. No, he'd called me . He had hardly been able to string a sentence together, but the only thing he'd cared about in that moment was making sure Isaac and I were safe.

And it was that barely audible confession he'd breathed out when I asked him why he'd done it.

"I wasn't exactly thinking clearly. I never can when it comes to you."

That made two of us. From the second I'd met him, it had taken every ounce of strength I possessed to remind myself of what he'd done. Why I hated him. And more and more every day, with every kind thing he did and every sweet word he said to me, it was getting harder and harder to stoke the embers of my fury and keep the fire burning.

"Have they come up with anything else since he left last night?" Morgan asked, bringing me out of my latest existential crisis.

I sighed and grabbed a handful of popcorn before answering. "Yeah. We texted a little after he got home from the police station, and then again this morning. He was too freaked out to notice it at the time, but even though the package was addressed to him, there was no return address or postage on it, which meant it was hand-delivered. He went through the footage on his security camera, and it was someone dressed in motorcycle gear from head to toe, including a helmet. Literally the only thing he could tell was that it was a woman, which we already knew. He gave everything to his PI, so maybe she or the police will be able to come up with something else, but I doubt it. This creeper has been so careful up to this point. There's no reason to think this'll be any different."

"Except this is a major escalation. She went from emails to the both of you to hand-delivering her panties to him. Which, again I say, ugh!" She shuddered dramatically once more. "At least they were new panties and not old, crusty ones."

I couldn't help it. I laughed. A big, loud belly laugh, and she joined in immediately. Leave it to my best friend to find a joke somewhere in this madness.

"Oh, my God," I cackled. "Ew!" Now it was my turn to shiver. "You're disgusting."

Isaac's crying cut through our guffawing, and I hopped up to get him out of his swing. I could tell as soon as I got within three feet of him that he needed to be changed…and that it needed the full functionality of the changing table. If the smell hadn't been enough of a clue, the way he was kicking his little legs and squirming around while wailing at the top of his lungs would have done it. He was not a fan of poopy diapers.

"I'll be right back," I told her, then unstrapped Isaac and picked him up. "Ven conmigo, mi gusanito." Come with me, my little worm. "Let's get you out of that dirty diaper and into some clean clothes."

Instead of staying on the couch, Morgan followed me into Amara's old bedroom, which had been repurposed into a nursery with some help from Malachi.

"You're actually voluntarily exposing yourself to the stench of formula sharts?" I teased, raising an eyebrow at her while I struggled to get my little wormy-worm out of his onesie amidst his wiggling and flailing around.

She laughed as she went over to the dresser and grabbed him a clean onesie, then draped it over the railing on the side of the table. "Um, have you forgotten that I've changed his formula shart diapers? Many of them?"

I snorted. "Touché."

"So, do you know what you and B are doing tonight?"

"Nope. He wouldn't tell me. All he said was to wear something comfortable that I don't mind getting dirty. Which I'm really confused by, since I have no idea what kind of dirty activity could possibly help him convince the general public he has a girlfriend. At least not one you can do at night. Can't exactly build houses for Habitat for Humanity in the dark."

She giggled. "No, you can't. Maybe he just wants to take you out on a regular date tonight. No photo ops or questions being shouted at you. Not everything has to be about pushing the narrative."

Why the hell did a little bubble of hope start to spring up inside me when she said that?

I didn't want to go on a real date with Braden. I didn't want to spend any time with him other than what I was obligated to do in that contract.

Yep, just keep on lying to yourself, Dani, the little voice in the back of my head snarked. That'll definitely make those tingles and butterflies go away.

"Um, we're not really dating, Morgan," I insisted, doing my best to shake away that thought. "Going on an actual date isn't part of my job description."

"Why is it so hard for you to accept that Braden might actually like you? You're gorgeous, smart, sweet, generous. Oh, and you're half-Cuban and speak fluent Spanish."

"Pfft, try fluent Spanglish."

"The point remains, you're a catch, babe," she said softly. "And I know B's a man whore, but I also know he has a heart of gold. He wouldn't be leading you on like this if it was just business to him."

It took everything in me not to groan in utter frustration and anguish.

A month ago, I would have laughed in Morgan's face. A month ago, there had been nothing I was more certain of than Braden Hicks's depravity.

But now…

I didn't know anything anymore. I was floundering. Adrift in a bottomless ocean of feelings and emotions I didn't know how to swim out of. And if I wasn't careful, I'd end up drowning in them.

My eyes bugged out of my head as Braden pulled into the parking lot of a building sporting a neon sign that read Smashes and Axes .

He'd taken me to a local family-owned Italian restaurant earlier and asked them to seat us way back in the corner where no one would see us. And now we were at…whatever the hell this place was. Suffice it to say, it definitely was not somewhere the press would follow us.

This felt way too much like an actual date. And the worst part about it was, I was enjoying myself. At least I had been so far. The jury was still out on whether that would continue to be the case.

"Uh…there are nicer places to take a girl," I chuckled nervously.

He laughed. "Trust me?"

No, I wanted to say. No, I don't trust you as far as I can throw you. And I throw like a girl.

"Of course," was what came out of my treacherous lips instead.

"Good. Come on, sweetheart. Just give it a try. If you don't like it, we'll leave and go hang out with Isaac for the rest of the night," he said, reaching over to squeeze my shoulder. "Deal?"

"Deal," I said, letting out a long exhale as I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car.

Braden walked around to my side of the car and took my hand, threading his fingers through mine as he led me inside. And I was still just as confused as I had been a minute ago. This place almost looked like an abandoned construction site with a counter and cash register in the center, except that the décor was way more purposeful than that.

Plywood and various broken appliances, dishes, and furniture adorned the wall behind the counter, with the business name spray-painted at the top graffiti-style. Off to one side, there were several private rooms that seemed to be full of old, run-down furniture, appliances, and…boxing dummies? The door to one of the rooms was closed, and I could hear heavy metal music and occasional screams and crashes coming from behind it. And on the other side of the building, there was a sign above a hallway that read Axe Throwing .

Okay, so axe throwing didn't sound so bad. I'd kind of been wanting to try it.

"Hey! Welcome to the rage room!" a middle-aged man wearing a tight black t-shirt, dirty jeans, and a construction hat exclaimed from behind the counter.

Whoa! Pause!

The what room?!

"Hi," Braden said, giving my hand a gentle squeeze, a silent reminder that I'd promised to trust him. "We've got a reservation under Braden Hicks."

The man tapped on his touchscreen for a few seconds. "Yep. Looks like we've got you two down for the deluxe package. Where would you like to start?"

"Up to you, beautiful." Braden let go of my hand and put an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his side. "Do you want to obliterate some shit first or throw some axes?"

Still completely speechless, I could only shrug.

"Let's do the rage room first," he said with a chuckle.

"You've got it. Right this way." The middle-aged guy gestured to a much younger man, who headed toward one of the private rooms.

The one who'd checked us in grabbed two hardhats and pairs of safety goggles and gloves before leading us into one of the rooms with a bunch of old junk. After introducing us to the younger guy, who I guessed was supposed to be supervising us, he walked out and closed the door behind him.

Looking around, I noticed that there was a table set up off to the side that had an iPad in a speaker dock, along with a variety of baseball bats, sledgehammers, lead pipes, and tire irons. And that the thick plywood on the walls was filled with shrapnel.

Wait a second. Did people actually pay real money to break all this stuff? Why?

"You're confused," Braden said, his lips twitching with a smile he was trying to hide.

"What gave that away?"

"Okay, so, for the record, I booked this the morning after we went to La Terrasse. Before the creepy weirdness with my rabid fangirl escalated. But after that bullshit, I need this as much as you do."

"Um, excuse me? I need this?" I sassed.

What part of breaking a bunch of crap did he think I needed?

I thought he'd laugh at me, but instead, his eyes grew sad. Or at least I thought they did, not that I could tell for sure through the scratched-to-hell safety goggles. Pulling me into a hug, he pressed a kiss to the top of the hardhat I was now wearing.

"Yeah. You do." He sighed as he pulled back to look at me. "You've had so much shit thrown at you in the past couple of months, Dani. You lost your sister, and you didn't even have a second to let that sink in before you had to start making a bunch of hard choices. Choices you weren't ready to make. Deciding to honor Amara's final wish and take custody of that beautiful little boy. Deciding how you wanted to lay her to rest. Deciding whether to finish school or drop out and get a job flipping burgers to keep a roof over your head. Deciding to do all this stuff with me so you didn't have to drop out of school, and then deciding to stick with it after my stalker found out who you were and threatened you.

"You just went into survival mode and put everything you were feeling on the back burner because you didn't have a choice. You didn't have time to process your emotions when you were too busy focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. So this is me giving you that time. I want you to take this hour and just let it out. Put on some loud music. Scream. Cry. Take a sledgehammer to that ancient-looking computer. Throw those plates at the wall and watch them shatter into a hundred pieces. Whale on those boxing dummies with a lead pipe. Do whatever you need to do. This is a judgment-free zone."

…And once again, I'd been rendered speechless.

Except that this time, it wasn't because I was confused. It was because he was one hundred percent right. I hadn't really let myself feel anything that had happened to me in the past six weeks. Other than my outburst in Amara's hospital room, I'd done my best to keep my composure. Sure, I'd cried. I'd cried more than I'd thought a human being was capable of. But I hadn't allowed myself to really let the floodgates open and process it all. The anger and fear and sense of injustice that the one person I'd been closest to in the whole world had been ripped away from me before her time. I hadn't been able to. Because I'd had to fly by the seat of my pants and figure out how to be a mother to her newborn son.

How ironic was it that the man who was responsible for my sister's death was the one who was giving me a safe space to feel that loss now? And how ass-backward was it that rather than making me want to take one of these sledgehammers to him instead of that decrepit old computer, this gesture had just endeared him to me a little bit more?

The guy who was here to make sure we didn't end up hurting ourselves went through a bunch of safety procedures with us and pulled up Spotify on the iPad, then went to stand in a corner, far away from the carnage. Walking over to the screen, I scrolled through the various curated playlists they had set up – although we'd been told we could play any music we wanted. I selected one of the lists and pressed play, and the heavy drumbeat intro of Disturbed's "Down With the Sickness" started to blare out of the speakers.

"Nice choice," Braden said with a grin. "So, where are we starting?"

Looking over the array of destruction possibilities in front of me, I decided to start small. This felt so weird and foreign to me that I honestly didn't have a clue what to do. I had serious doubts about whether this would do anything at all to help me process all the big feelings I'd been keeping bottled up for way too long. But I'd promised to give it a try, so I picked up a teacup that looked like it belonged in a grandma's china cabinet – you know, the kind that was for display only and never actually got used – and tossed it against the wall.

Okay, so the way it shattered was kind of satisfying.

"Come on, beautiful. You can do better than that. Let ‘er rip." He picked up an ugly brown glass pitcher and chucked it at the wall with a loud, "Fuuuuck!"

Rolling my eyes and shaking my head, I moved on to a dinner plate, throwing it with a little more force. "Shit!"

Damn, it felt good to just scream at the top of my lungs.

Braden and I picked up dish after dish and threw them at the wall, belting out expletives with each toss. And I couldn't deny it was kind of freeing to be allowed to tap into the rage I'd been keeping so carefully contained for the past several weeks. When we were out of things to shatter, we went back over to the table to select our next mediums of carnage. After testing out the weight of the various tool offerings, I selected a medium-sized rubber mallet and zeroed in on a worn-down wooden table, while he grabbed a tire iron and headed toward the massive desktop computer screen in the middle of the room.

Raising the mallet above my head, I brought it down with as much force as I could muster as the memories of that horrific night flooded my mind. I watched as a huge crack appeared in the wood and imagined it was that judgey nurse's face.

"Fuck!"

Whack!

The droning of that flatlining heart monitor.

"Shit!"

Smash!

That doctor's monotone voice as he'd called her time of death.

"God damn it!"

Thud! Bang! Crash!

Vicki, that goddamn publicist, telling me she didn't care if my dead sister had been abducted by aliens and she'd sue and have me arrested if I ever called again.

"Rancid bitch!"

Whack-smash-boom-bang-wallop-crack!

This infernal man who had me tied up in knots. The way he almost made me forget every unforgivable thing he'd done. The fucking butterflies I got in my stomach every time he touched me.

"Fuck you! Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou! GO FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF!!!"

My arms were burning, my throat was raw, and tears were streaming down my face as I dropped the mallet and collapsed to floor, wailing at the top of my lungs.

In the next instant, the hardhat was removed from my head and the safety goggles were being pulled off my face. And then Braden's arms – both the last and only arms I ever wanted to be in – wrapped around me as he dropped to his knees beside me.

"I've got you, sweetheart," he murmured, so softly I could barely even hear it over the screaming lyrics of "Psychosocial" by Slipknot, while pressing a kiss to my hair. "Let it out. It's okay. I've got you."

"You gonna be okay, beautiful?" Braden asked quietly as he put his Escalade in park in front of my apartment building.

After I'd somewhat composed myself in the rage room, he had asked me if I wanted to come home, and even though I felt bad that he wasn't getting his money's worth, I'd said yes. I was drained. Not just physically – although I was definitely going to be taking some preemptive ibuprofen tonight to try to mitigate the sore arms and back I knew I'd wake up with – but mentally and emotionally too.

I still didn't know whether tonight's activities had helped me. Everything was still there. All the pain, grief, anger, heartache, and confusion. The only difference was that I'd actually let myself feel it for once…and now I didn't know how to stop feeling it.

But he didn't need to hear any of that, so I just nodded.

"Yeah. I'll be fine. Sorry we had to skip axe throwing."

"It's okay. I had a feeling we might not get to that. Tonight was for you, not me." He tucked some of my hair behind my ear before resting his palm on my face. "You want me to come up for a little while? I hate just leaving you like this."

I shook my head. "I'm okay, really. And Morgan's here."

His thumb gently stroked my cheek for several long seconds, and it felt like I needed a machete to cut through the tension as his warm mahogany eyes gazed into mine.

"Okay. Goodnight, beautiful," he whispered.

Then he leaned across the console and brushed his lips over mine.

Instead of pushing him away like I should have, I found myself slowly, tentatively moving my lips in time with his. Giving in to those godforsaken butterflies for just a moment. Wondering if maybe I could find a way to move past the history he didn't know existed and make this work.

I blamed that fucking rage room and all the feelings it had brought to the surface, because that was the only possible explanation for why I was acting like this.

Until my sister's face flitted through my mind. Her agonized screams as she gave birth to that precious little boy. Her slurred final words to Isaac before she fell asleep for the last time. Her lifeless body lying on that hospital bed as a team of medical professionals tried to revive her.

And I remembered that the man I was kissing was responsible for all of it because he was the one who'd put that baby inside her to begin with.

"No!" I exclaimed as I pulled back, choking down the lump that was rising in my throat. "What the hell are you doing?!"

Braden's eyes widened for a second, but then his shocked expression turned to remorse. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I wasn't thinking."

"No, you weren't," I rasped. "I told you this was just business. Nothing happens in private. Remember?"

He sighed as he went to reach for my face again, but then seemed to think better of it and put his hand on my arm. "If that's what you still want, I'll respect it. But I need you to know this stopped being business for me the second I kissed you outside that restaurant two weeks ago."

God damn it. Why had I ever agreed to go through with this? When did feelings ever not enter an equation like this? There was only so much pretending you could do before it wasn't pretend anymore. And somewhere between his smiles, his concern for me, and watching him interact with the precious baby boy he'd helped create without knowing who it was, I'd crossed that line a mile back.

"It can't be anything else," I sniffled. "We have a contract."

"I'll tear it up."

"It's not that simple, Braden." My voice was thick with the tears I couldn't hold back anymore. "You don't understand."

"Then help me to," he said quietly. "Because I can't just walk away when that contract is up, Dani. I can't keep pretending you're not the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about at night. I can't act like I don't see forever every time I look at you. So help me understand why we can't start fresh without that stupid piece of paper and give this a real shot."

No.

Absolutely fucking not.

He had no fucking right to say shit like that to me after everything he'd done.

"Because you're the reason my sister's dead!" I screamed before I could stop myself.