The Paper Swan(77)

The bullet had grazed her shoulder and although it had exited without permanent damage, her arm was still in a sling from the injury. Damian could not look at her without thinking of her blood trickling through his fingers the moment he’d caught her. Blood that he had spilled. Warren’s men had apprehended him. They had carried Skye and Victor, who had passed out from blood loss, to the helicopter. Warren had flown to the hospital with them, while Damian was taken—handcuffed and guarded—to the police station. Rafael had kept him updated on Skye’s status and recovery, but he had not seen her since his arrest.

She was blond again. Her sleek, chin length hair was tucked behind one ear. From Damian’s angle, it accentuated her full, pink lips and made him yearn for things he’d lost the rights to when he’d pulled the trigger.

Skye was wedged between her father and Nick Turner, the guy she’d had dinner with on the night Damian had abducted her. Damian hated him for sitting so close to her, for being able to sit so close to her, his shoulder touching hers. He hated him more for that one single privilege than all the charges Nick had brought against him, because Nick was also the lawyer who was prosecuting Damian.

Although Damian had dual citizenship—Mexican and American—he was tried in San Diego because he had kidnapped Skye on U.S. soil. Except it never got to a trial. Damian pled guilty. He had maimed Victor, kidnapped Skye, held her captive, cut off her finger and finally, shot her. Damian’s lawyer and Nick worked out a plea bargain, with Nick pushing for the harshest sentence.

Nick despised Damian for taking away the girl he had come to adore, and for the things he believed he had done to her. Although Skye refused to see Nick outside of legal proceedings, Nick was convinced it was because of the trauma she had suffered, and that with time, she would give him another chance. He did not believe her when she told him she had fallen in love with Damian. So what if Damian was this Esteban kid she had once known? Skye was not in her right mind and it was up to him and Warren to put Damian behind bars forever. They trumped the kidnapping charge to aggravated kidnapping, given that Damian had caused Skye bodily harm. They wanted to tack on aggravated rape, but Skye insisted that the sex had been consensual, and refused to let them turn it into something ugly.

Of course, Damian knew none of this as he watched Skye between the two men. He saw them as a unit, a trio of joined forces.

Whatever you choose, Damian, know that I will always, always love you, she had said to him.

He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that so much, but how could he, knowing that she was withholding the one thing that would have earned him some lenience? The fact that he had let her go. He had set her free, dropped her off and she had come back to him. That was something only the two of them knew. Yes, he had made the wrong choice. He had given in to the darkness when he should have stood by her, but he needed to know that she still cared. He would happily spend the rest of his life locked up in a cage for all the things he had done, but he needed that one fleeting moment of light, so he could go knowing that it had been real for her.

As Damian stood before the judge, ready to receive his sentence, his eyes fell on Skye. One look, one glance from those haunting gray eyes, and he’d be redeemed.

Say something, I’m giving up on you.

But she kept her head bowed. She had not looked at him the entire time, and she did not look at him then. Skye knew that if she did, if she looked up from her lap, she wouldn’t be able to keep anything from him, and she had held it together for too long to let everything fall apart now. The sooner this case got wrapped up, the better for them all.

She had told her father and Nick that Damian had let her go, that she was the one who had gone back, but they were convinced she had suffered some kind of psychological breakdown. They were prepared to call in a psychiatrist to discredit anything favorable she had to say about Damian, and testify that she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“I can’t understand why you’re defending him, Skye.” Her father had paced the hospital room where she was recovering from the bullet wound. “Look at what he’s done to you. He shot you, Skye. He was going to shoot me, but he ended up shooting you. Is this the kind of guy you want walking free? Someone who is so blinded by revenge that he can’t see straight?”

“You were blind too, Dad, so blind that you couldn’t see what you did to MaMaL—”

“You want to know what I did to MaMaLu?” Warren’s eyes flashed with indignation. “I saved MaMaLu. That’s right. I saved her. El Charro and his men would have killed her. Prison was the safest place for her. Out of sight, out of mind. I paid Victor a small fortune to make sure Esteban was looked after and that MaMaLu got everything she needed in Valdemoros. I don’t know if any of that money made it to her. I suspect Victor used that money to start up his private security business, but that’s irrelevant now. As soon as we were settled in our new home, I was going to send for MaMaLu and Esteban, get them new identities, and sponsor them over. I owed it to her. A new life, a fresh start. But it didn’t work out that way. She died before I could get them out. I went looking for Esteban, but his uncle was gone and he had disappeared. There was no trace of him. No one knew where he went or what happened to him. I closed that chapter of our lives with a heavy heart, Skye. I burned the letters you wrote. It broke my heart, but I wanted to protect you. You were so young, I was sure you’d forget. I thought it would be easier if you assumed they’d moved on.” Warren sighed and sank down onto the chair. “If there’s one thing I regret, apart from not leaving Mexico while your mother was alive, it’s MaMaLu. And if Damian wants to come after me for that, fine. But I’m not letting him get away with this.” He gestured to Skye’s bed and all the machines beeping around them.