Finding It (Losing It, #3)(69)

“And here’s Bucharest. I’m not in this first one, but, oh, look, there I am.” I laid a second and a third. “And I sure as hell don’t remember seeing you at that club in Belgrade, but I guess you were. You captured the light perfectly on that one, by the way.”

I went to lay down more sketches, angry and fighting with tears, but my hands shook. Like leaves, the papers drifted to the ground. Places I’d seen. Cities I’d visited. The last month of my life sketched out in black and white.

“Kelsey—”

“Just explain something to me, Hunt. Is it a game? Or are you a stalker? Are all those missed calls your parole officer? I called you a serial killer that first night or, well, the first night for me. I’d been kidding, but maybe I’d known something was off even then.”

“I swear it wasn’t like that, Kelsey. I know it looks bad, but it was never my intention to—”

“To what? Follow me across a continent? Worm your way into my life? Into my bed? God, but you were f*cking patient, weren’t you? If you’d slept with me that first night, I would have left and been on my way. But no … that wasn’t enough.”

He gripped my shoulders, and for the first time, fear coiled around my anger because I had no idea what he was capable of. Even now, I had no idea what he wanted from me.

“It’s not a game. I meant every moment, and I can explain all of this if you’ll just give me a chance.”

A vibration buzzed on the desk, and I snatched Hunt’s phone from where I’d set it down.

I held it up to him. “Or I could find out the truth for myself?”

He threw out a hand as I pressed answer, but I ducked, pulling back a few feet. I stood near the door of the bar and pressed the phone to my ear.

I saw Hunt’s expression first—devastated and defeated. Then I heard a familiar voice through speaker.

“It’s about damn time, Hunt. Tell me what the hell my daughter is doing or you’re fired.”

The phone slipped from my hand, and time seemed to move into slow motion as it dropped. My heart fell at the same speed, long enough that it could have passed through galaxies before it hit the floor. The phone at least made a satisfying crack when it landed, but the crash of my heart was nothing more than a dull, hollow thud.

“Not just a stalker. A paid stalker.”

I guess it wasn’t me he wanted something from after all.

It’s a quiet thing when your heart breaks. I thought it would be loud, louder even than the air rushing around us when we’d dove off that bridge. I thought it would drown everything else out.

But it happened like a whisper. A small, clean split. It broke in a second, and the pain was little more than a pinprick.

It’s the echo that kills you. Like the echo inside the Grotta Azzurra, that tiny little sound kept bouncing around the cavern of my ribs, getting louder and louder. It multiplied until I heard a hundred hearts breaking, a thousand, more. All of them mine.

“Kelsey, just listen.”

How could I listen? I couldn’t hear anything over this pain.

Outside. Outside maybe the sound would have somewhere to go.

I grabbed my bag. It didn’t have everything in it, but it had the most important things. It had what I needed to run.

I blew past him, and I didn’t even look at his body, at the towel slung around his hips. I couldn’t let myself. My mind was decades ahead of the rest of me. My body still remembered the shape of his and that damn gravity still pulled and pulled and pulled.

So I pulled back, and broke out into a run.

I thought I would make it farther, that maybe I could make it down to the main road, and for once there might be a taxi nearby without having to wait or call.

He overtook me before I’d even worked up a sweat. He’d pulled on a pair of gym shorts and two unlaced tennis shoes. He panted like he was running from the devil himself.

“Don’t come near me.”

“I never meant to hurt you, Kelsey. I love—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t you f*cking say it.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or collapse, and my body shook with the force of everything pent up inside me.

I scoffed. “Yeah, I can see how you just did this all by accident. You accidentally followed me all over Europe, and accidentally got paid for it. Shit like that happens all the time.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“I don’t care. It wouldn’t have mattered. I told you about my parents. I told you about everything.”

“I know. I know. And I haven’t talked to your father in weeks. You saw the voice mails. I’ve not told him anything important.”

I was moving to dart around him, but I stopped cold.

“When was the last time?”

He hesitated.

“Damn it, Hunt. When was the last time you played spy for my father?”

“Prague.”

Oh, God. I was going to be sick.

Prague was everything, the beginning of it all. We’d met before then, but I couldn’t even remember half of that now. Prague was where he’d spun my cares away on that merry-go-round. Prague was where he convinced me that I could find another place that felt like home, or another person even. Prague was when I’d started falling.