by S. Ann Cole
So, no, it wasn’t his cheating that had me shaken up. It was the chilling realization that someone, other than Davian Hamilton, had the power to cause me so much pain.
If someone had asked me, five minutes before I turned that doorknob, how I would feel if I discovered Xavier was cheating me, I would’ve shrugged and said,“It is what it is.” Because I couldn’t have imagined, or even believed, how painfully loud my heart would crack at the sight of a naked woman in his bed.
I was devastated. Ruined. In pain. I was hurting in places I never knew I could hurt.
I hadn’t realized it, hadn’t wanted to admit it until I walked into that room, that I’d unwittingly fallen in love with Xavier Xander.
That evening down in the cave, I’d chosen him over Davian and hadn’t even realized it until my mouth, of its own volition, blurted it out to Xavier.
All this time I thought I was playing a game, when in fact, the game, my own game, was playing me—as pointed out by -A.
The din of the penthouse receiver echoed throughout the apartment, jolting me from my thoughts. Sinking lower into the bathtub, I ignored it.
Xavier had been blowing up my cell since I left Beach Rock, till I got frustrated and smashed the damn thing into a wall.
Only the concierge ever rang the penthouse receiver, to inform me I had a visitor I gave no notice about. And I knew it wasn’t Xavier, because he had his own keycard.
The ringing stopped, only to start ringing again two minutes later. I sunk even lower into the tub, till half my face was immersed in the water. The ringing ceased.
Five minutes later, it started up again.
Sighing, I clambered out of the tub and slipped and dripped my way out into the main room to answer the phone.
“What?”
“Uh, I’m really sorry to bother you, Miss O’Hara,” came the nettled voice of the concierge, “but I have a very persistent Davian Hamilton here requesting to see you. Should I give him a guest card?”
Davian? How the hell did he know where I lived? Aside from Xavier, Lion and Danni, not even Xena knew where I lived. My heart thudded hard, once, and then stopped.
Did Jessica tell him about Jacob?
“No.”
“Will you be coming down to him or should I send him on his way?”
“Send him on his way.”
“Okay, Miss O’Hara. Have a goo—” There was rustling, expletives, protests, and then Davian’s voice was on the line. “Ally, stop shutting me out. I need to talk to you.”
Vehement protesting from the concierge continued in the background.
“Is this talk about you leaving Jess?”
“Maybe. I dunno. Shit…” I could picture him pushing his fingers back through his stylish haircut.
“Security!” bellowed the concierge in the background. “Security!”
“Let me up, Ally,” Davian begged more urgently. “I need to tell you the truth…why I stopped checking in.”
Well, that got my attention. “There was a reason other than Jess?”
“The reason was never Jess. Jess was after,” he said quickly. “Let me u—”
Prolonged rustling, punctuated by curses and warnings, ensued. “Sir, you need to leave the premises now, before I am forced to remove you.”
A moment later, the phone was back in possession of the concierge. “Miss O’Hara, I deeply apologize—”
“Give him a guest card.”
A pause. “Are…Are you sure, Miss O’Hara?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Send him up.”
I hung up, glanced down at my wet nakedness. A puddle was forming at my feet. No time to mop up, I slipped and slide to the bedroom, dried off, threw on a robe, and hastily towel-dried my hair, getting rid of all the excess water.
At the ping of the elevator, I tentatively walked back out to the main room, breath hitching at the sight of Davian standing in my apartment. The rocker I wish had chosen me.
He was clean, fresh, and stylish as usual, in dark denims, a black T-shirt, a studded denim jacket that had leather sleeves and a hood, and studded black boots to complement.
Davian had always been stylish, more pop than rock, and usually had some coveted statement pieces. Even more now that he was famous and could hire designers to create custom pieces for him.
He looked damn good.
Not surprised at me living in a penthouse, he didn’t look around or ask questions. His stare was fixed solely on me. Mentally stripping my robe off. Holding me down. Raping me. A look I was all too familiar with.
No way. No way in hell would that be happening tonight.
“How do you know where I live?”
“Mel.”
“What?” Mel, of all people? “Mel gave out information on me?”
Walking toward me, he held up a hand, “Before you go running to your cousin to get her fired, hear me out first.”
I bristled, a strange feeling clouding over me. “H-how do you know Chad and Mel are connected?”
Davian’s gaze shifted from mine, scanned around the apartment, then landed on me again. “Jess wasn’t the reason I didn’t check in.” He shifted on his feet, seemingly nervous, and if I wasn’t mistaking, afraid. “It was your cousin.”
Knees buckling, I reached for something to lean on, but found nothing within my reach.
Chad. Chad. Goddamn Chad!
Davian rushed forward and looped an arm around my waist to keep me from falling. “Maybe we should sit down.”
He walked with me into the living area and urged me down to a sofa.
Shrugging out of his jacket, he threw it over the back of the sofa and sat down close to me, taking my hand in his.
“I want you to understand I’m taking a huge risk here, Ally. Probably one I’ll regret in the morning. I’m not choosing you over Jess, but I am choosing you over someone I love more than both of you: my father.” He drew in a breath, letting it out through his nostrils. “This isn’t gonna go over well with your cousin, but it was driving me insane knowing you believed I just upped and dumped you. Knowing you thought I willingly chose Jess. Knowing you stupidly thought she could ever replace you.”
I sucked in a shaky breath. “He threatened you, didn’t he?”
“That’s putting it mildly.” His gaze scanned the apartment again. “I know he’s loaded, sure he’s the one behind this penthouse, and I’m one-hundred-percent positive it’s bugged. So he’ll know I ‘defied’ his orders. I’m also aware he’s very powerful…and dangerous.”
“What did he do, Davi?” I gritted out, my blood heating.
“I wasn’t feeling so good after an opening performance one night when we were on tour,” he began. “Felt dizzy, kinda high, even though I don’t do drugs. So I went back to the bus to try sleeping it off. Next time I woke up, I was in a white room, like a madhouse. I was strapped to a chair, and my wrist”—he held up his wrist with the ruined tattoo—“was slashed and positioned off the chair handle so the blood could drip into a container on the floor.”
“Wha—”
He cut me off, “I’ve never told you this before, but at your eighteenth birthday party, he’d cornered me and warned me to steer clear of you or he would cut my hands off. I never took the dude serious, thought he was just being overprotective, the same way I would be if I saw some twenty-five-year-old wannabe rock star fishing around my eighteen-year-old sister, you know?” He shook his head. “I had no idea the guy was a living psycho. When the door to that white room opened and your cousin walked in, I thought for sure I would never again be able to play a guitar.”
“I cannot believe this!!” I exploded, surging to my feet. “Who the hell does he think—”
Davian yanked me back down on the sofa and threw one of his denim-clad legs over both of mine to keep me still.
“Relax, baby,” he soothed, brushing a gentle kiss across my lips. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not oka—”
He pressed a finger to my lips to shut me up, then continued. “He kept me locked up in that room for days. Beat the shit outta me. Starved me. Threw ice-cold water on me whenever I dared to fall asleep. All the while going on about how careless and irresponsible I was. How you’re just a child and I should have known better. On the fourth day, he declared he would keep his promise to cut my hands off so I would never ruin another teenage girl’s life again. By this time I was beaten half to death. And when he brandished a machete, I started firing questions out of fear, to delay him. I wanted to know why he chose to punish me at that point in time when I was away from you. You and I had been dating for months, and he knew we were dating, he saw us together multiples times and gave no indication that he gave a shit. I asked him if I was about to lose my hand for something else, because his punishment couldn’t possibly be because I was sleeping with you.
“Turned out he wasn’t a man who liked being questioned, because he jerked my head back, placed the blade at my throat and said he no longer felt like being lenient, so instead of removing my hands, he would remove my head.”
Davian squeezed my hand, staring me straight in the eyes. “I’m not embarrassed to tell you I almost pissed myself, Ally.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he shushed me and continued. “His girlfriend burst into the room in that exact moment and shouted, ‘Chad, no! JK’s here. He says he doesn’t know. She didn’t tell him.’
“This news, whatever it meant, was enough to stop your cousin. I asked what it was that you didn’t tell me, and his girlfriend answered, ‘That she’s pregnant’. Then they both left me in the room.”
I sat still, speechless, cold, my chest heaving up and down, unsure of how to feel, how to respond.
None of this made sense. If Davian knew about Jacob, what could possibly be so life-threatening to keep him away from his own son? To start a new life with someone else and pretend we didn’t exist? He’d never once inquired about Jacob. Not once.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this.
“You knew?” I managed to croak out.
“Yes. And I’m sorry I couldn’t—”
“All this time?”
I tried to move, but his leg around both of mine kept me locked in place. I understood the gesture now; he knew I would lose my shit once he broke this to me.
“Listen, Ally, I couldn’t contact you,” he explained. “When he returned the next day, he laid out the command that I wasn’t ever to go near you again. He said as long as you were living at Saskia’s, I would be living elsewhere. I told him he might as well go ahead and cut my head off, because that’s the only way he could keep me from my baby. That’s when he broke it to me…” He paused to swallow, breathing in and out, in and out. “That there would be no baby, because you went and got an abortion that same morning.” He covered his hands over his face and made a deep inhumane growl in his throat before continuing, “I was pissed. Pissed at you. I was destroyed. Ripped apart. Imagine, I was holed up in a white room for days, bleeding from my wrist, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten within an inch of my life for you, and none of it even compared to the pain I felt when he told me what you did. I was mad at you. So mad. If you had just fought for us….I swear I would’ve let him chop my head off to let my child live.”
Heart lodged in my throat, I tried to speak, tried to explain, tried to refute the vicious lie, but he roughly slapped his hand over my mouth and warned me not to speak.
Reading the anger and resentment in his eyes, I kept quiet.
“I cried. He stood there and watched me bawl like a pussy. Then he carried on with his commands. I still refused, so he brought in an incentive: Dad.
“Apparently, some time ago Dad paid an organization your cousin runs to…do something. Something horrible. Something that could put him down for life. None of it sounded like my father, none of it made sense, so I called his bluff. Refused to give in…but when he showed us video evidence, I knew then that I’d lost you for good. I had to choose between you and my father, and I chose my father.”
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.
He didn’t know about Jacob. He thought I had a frickin’ abortion. Oh my God.
“The deal was simple, Ally: I stayed out of your life, my father doesn’t face jail time and I get to keep my head. He said I was to mark the slash through my tattoo as the end of us.”
No wonder it had been so easy to persuade his father to keep Jacob as a secret. It wasn’t about saving Davian’s reputation and impending marriage, it was about saving his ass. He’d known if he told Davian he would come back to me, and that would’ve been the end of the deal.
“What does he have?” My voice was a wisp of air. “On your father.”
Davian shook his head. “I love you to pieces, Ally, but sorry, that’s something I’m taking to my grave.”
I leaned in and pressed my face to his chest. “I understand.”
His arms came around me, his chin resting on top of my head. “By that time, the tour had long since moved on, yet somehow your cousin knew exactly where the bus was located and dropped me there a week later. But the label had dumped Ice Steam because no one knew where I’d disappeared to.
“I was beat to shit, but Benny didn’t care. He kicked us to the curb. Thought I was a druggie. Said he didn’t turn druggies into stars because it usually ended in an overdose or suicide. He left me stranded on the road side in some godforsaken place and moved on. I didn’t know where I was or what to do, so I just started walking. For hours.”
“Oh my—”
“Until who showed up?” Davian broke in, “Your cousin and his girlfriend. Flung me in the back of their jeep, drove ahead of the bus to the next tour stop. Then when the bus was finally reached, they cleared everyone off, except Benny. They went in and were locked up for about half-an-hour. When they came out, Benny was all smiles and cheers and apologies. Ice Steam was back on the tour.
“I’d like to think our instant success and fame is because we’re as good as Ninety Miles, but even I have to take a step down from my ego ladder and admit no one is as good as Ninety Miles. Where Ice Steam is right now, and Benny’s avid efforts in promoting us alongside Ninety Miles, has a lot to with your cousin. Not our talent.”
I told his chest, “I wish I could get angry for you right now and promise you that I’m gonna tell Chad what I think of his despicable ass and cut him off for good, but I can’t. It’s pointless letting myself get angry anymore whenever he does things like this. Nothing I do or say will change his views or actions. He does whatever he wants and no one can stop him. He’s like his own god. I’ve never met anyone who’s not afraid of him. Davi, I’m afraid of him.”
Pulling back a little, he cupped my face. “I would never ask you to do that, Ally. In his own twisted way, he was just trying to protect your honor. I mean, he thought I knocked you up and left. As a big brother, that’s something I can understand. He’s just a little on the psychotic side, is all.
“I don’t want you to do or say anything to him. At all. That’s not why I’m here. I came to let you know it didn’t happen how you think it did. I didn’t meet Jess and forget about you. Jess showed up on the tour when it was close to ending. I was a mess. Drinking around the clock with Xavi, trying anything to numb the pain. Not doing my best on stage, which was pissing the band off.
“Jess came on the scene and she was caring, understanding, patient with me. She pried me away from the alcohol and nursed me back to sanity, helped me regain focus. Somewhere along the way, I fell for her. But I never forgot you, Alina. And Jess knows—she knows she’s sharing my heart with someone else. She understands. She just doesn’t know that someone else is you.”
As of today, she does.
I bit my lip at the word ‘sharing’ to hide the trembling, to wrestle down the tears. Only Davian could make me so vulnerable, weak, desperate. Only Davian could hurt me with just one word. Sharing.
“Davi…” I whispered.
His face twisted in anguish and regret. “Don’t ask me to do it, Ally. At least, not now.”
I couldn’t hold them back any longer. The tears came, and so did the pain. “But you’re the reason I came here. You’re my heart.”
“She loves me, too,” he said, so quietly it would’ve been swept away by the wind if time wasn’t so still between us.
“I love you more!” I cried in his face. “I loved you first!”
Releasing me and removing his leg from around mine, he rubbed his hands over his face. “You, of all people, know the kind of man I am, Ally. You know I actually give a shit about people’s feelings. You know I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to selfishly rip some girl’s heart out just because…”
I waited for him to finish, but he just sat there with his face in his hands. “Just because what?”
Removing his hands from his face, he cocked his head to me. “Just because the real deal shows up.”
“So you’d rather spend the rest of your life married to her while being in love with me?” I asked, scooting to the edge of the sofa, closer to him. “Davi, selfishness is necessary sometimes in order to get your happy ending. Sacrificing your own happiness for someone else’s never, ever works out in the end. If you’ve never had to disappoint a few people and break a few hearts to get your true love, then that love is bullshit. Love, any type of love that comes easily is mediocre. True love doesn’t. True love is hard work. You chased me for a whole year before I finally gave in.”
I reached for his hands, and he let me take them. “The greatest loves are usually the messiest ones. Don’t be afraid to get messy when it comes to going after what you know is real.”
