Incipient A Dark Paranormal Romance - Bianca Scardoni Page 0,113
from the night bit against the wet tracks they’d left. “He ran me off the road and then dragged me into the woods. He tried to….” My voice trembled as I met his haunted eyes and shook my head. I couldn’t seem to say the word out loud. It made it too…real. Too painful.
His eyebrows knitted together as he took a careful step toward me, his eyes softening some. “He tried to what?” he asked, working his jaw muscle to control whatever was going on inside of him.
I shook my head again, apparently having lost all ability to speak.
“Did he…hurt you?”
I opened my mouth to answer him and then closed it as headlights from an oncoming car bled onto us. I squinted away from the abrasive lights, waiting for the car to pass us by so we could finish our conversation, only it didn’t.
The car came to a stop behind me, though it took me several tries of blinking through my glassy gaze to realize it was Gabriel.
“What’s going on?” asked Trace, his voice carrying the same alarm that was rolling through my own stomach.
Gabriel’s eyes fell on me and I nearly toppled over from their weight. “Dominic has Tessa, Jemma. We need to go.”
A suffocating cloud of anxiety slammed into my body as I stood there and stared at him, my legs unmoving and entirely numb. I heard Trace whistle toward Caleb’s house and then mindlessly watched as Ben starting jogging toward us, but everything seemed to be far away, as though I were watching it happen to someone else on a television screen instead of living it myself.
Dominic had Tessa.
Tessa was with Dominic.
Bile crept up my throat as reality slowly closed in on me. This was bad, so unbelievably bad, and every part of my body, heart, and mind knew it.
“Jemma,” called Gabriel, drawing my attention back to him. “We need to go. Now.”
40. HIGHWAY TO HELL
By the time we had all piled into Gabriel’s SUV, the numbness in my extremities had somewhat subsided, though it was quickly being replaced with racing, disorganized thoughts that were storming through my head like a hurricane. Gabriel was speaking with Trace and Ben, who were both sitting in the back seat, explaining what had happened, but none of his words were making sense to me.
How had Dominic gotten a hold of Tessa in the first place? She would have never put herself in that position. She would have never been stupid enough to go see him alone. That was something I would have done—not Tessa.
“I don’t understand,” I blurted out in the middle of their discussion. “I need you to start at the beginning.”
Gabriel gave me a sympathetic look, his brows pulled down over his concern-riddled eyes. “Of course.”
“How did this happen? Did she go after him? And why now? What triggered this?” I asked, unable to focus on a single question.
“She found out what he did to you in the woods the other night and went after him—”
“You told her?” I asked, appalled that he would be so careless as to arm a ticking time bomb like my sister. “Dammit, Gabriel. You had no right to tell her.”
“Well, somebody had to,” he answered angrily, as though he had been the one attacked that night. “She needed to know how bad things have gotten, Jemma. How dangerous he’s become.”
“I told you I was going to take care of him.”
“You weren’t in a position to do that,” he said, glancing over at me regretfully and then returning his focus to the road. “I thought that if your sister knew, the two of us could do something about him together.”
“So, what the hell happened? She just decided to ride off into the sunset and take care of it on her own?”
“In short, yes.”
“And you actually let her do that?!” I asked, aghast. Way to have her back, Gabriel.
“Of course not,” he answered, his hands white knuckling the steering wheel. “She told me she was going out to the store. I had no reason not to believe her. I’m guessing she wanted to take care of him immediately and felt that I was not in any condition to help.” The sting of her assumption was audible in his tone.
I let out a breath of frustration because that definitely sounded like my sister. “So, what happened after that? I’m assuming Dominic called you to boast about his acquisition?”
He nodded.
Typical smug asshole. And then something occurred to me. “Why didn’t he call me?”