Chapter 6: The Truth Behind the Promise

I couldn’t breathe. My father’s words kept replaying in my head. Don’t go anywhere with him. Dorian stood beside me, completely still, and for once every trace of control had drained out of his face.

“What did he mean?” I asked.

Dorian didn’t answer.

I turned toward him. “What truth?”

“Zaire.”

“No.” I stepped closer. “You don’t get to kiss me, make me trust you, and then suddenly go silent.”

His jaw tightened. “I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“When I knew you were ready.”

I laughed, and it came out sharper than I meant it to. “Everyone keeps deciding what I’m ready for.” I pulled the black ribbon from my wrist and let it drop to the floor between us. “I’m done.”

I turned toward the door, and Dorian caught my hand, not roughly, just held it there like an anchor.

“Your father made a deal with my family.”

I froze.

“Before you were born,” he continued, watching my face for a reaction he clearly wasn’t going to like.

My stomach twisted. “What kind of deal?”

“My father owed your father something.”

“What?”

“Money. Protection. A life.”

I stared at him, waiting, and his voice dropped even lower. “And when your father couldn’t repay him, he offered something else.”

I already knew the answer before I asked it. “What?”

Dorian looked straight into my eyes. “You.”

The room went completely silent, and my chest felt hollowed out. “My father promised me to your family?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

He hesitated a beat too long. “Marriage.”

I laughed again, and it sounded broken this time. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“I’m not.”

“You were coming to the club because of that?”

“At first.”

My smile disappeared instantly. “At first?”

He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him even through the anger. “Then I met you.”

“And?”

“I stopped seeing a promise.” His eyes held mine, steady and unblinking. “I started seeing you.”

My heart betrayed me with one painful, traitorous beat. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No,” he said, honest in a way that hurt worse than a lie would have. “Because I know what my family did to yours.”

“What did they do?”

Before he could answer, my father’s voice cut through the room from the doorway. “They took everything.”

I turned. He stood there with his eyes full of a regret sixteen years deep.

“Dorian’s father didn’t just want you promised to their family.” He looked directly at me. “He wanted control of mine.”

My blood ran cold. “And Dorian?”

My father closed his eyes like the next sentence physically cost him something. “Dorian was the only one who tried to stop him.”

I looked at Dorian differently then, and for the first time I wondered if my favorite customer had never been the danger at all. Maybe he’d been standing between me and something far worse the entire time.

Then my phone buzzed in my pocket, sharp and sudden enough to make all three of us flinch. Unknown number. One message.

You shouldn’t trust either of them.

A second message followed before I could even process the first one. Your father didn’t disappear. He was released.

I stared at the screen, my hands starting to shake again, and a third message landed right on top of the second. Ask him what he had to do to earn his freedom.

I looked up slowly at my father, and he had gone completely pale, all the color draining out of him like the words had reached through the phone and grabbed him by the throat. Dorian saw the messages over my shoulder, and his whole expression changed in an instant.

“Give me the phone.”

I stepped backward, out of his reach. “No.”

“Zaire.”

“Who is texting me?”

Neither of them answered, and that silence told me more than either of them ever could have said out loud. Someone else had been watching all three of us this whole time, someone who knew exactly what happened years ago, someone who already knew my father was alive.

And now they knew exactly where I was.