Taken by Dad’s Best Friend: My Biggest Regret Chapter 09
We came out of the hotel to find four police cruisers at the entrance.
That was when Julian told me that the second we left the
bridal suite, Damian had called it in himself.
Two unconscious strangers found in the bride’s suite. It
sounded absurd on paper. It was more than enough to make
sure the Calloway wedding did not happen on schedule.
Not long after, I got a call I wasn’t expecting.
Local precinct.
Once I understood they wanted me as a witness in an assault
investigation, I was there within the hour.
So was Damian.
I ignored the cup of water he pushed toward me. We sat on
opposite sides of the table and answered everything they
asked, truthfully.
When the detectives laid it out, that the two men had been
hired by Serena to film a video of me they could use as
leverage, Damian’s face cycled through three colors and he
didn’t say a word for a very long time.
I was barely out the precinct doors when he stepped into my path.
“That day, when I asked you,” he said, brows drawn tight, “why
didn’t you just tell me the truth?”
I found it almost amusing.
“If I had, would you have believed me?”
From the day Serena appeared, everything I said and
everything I did was, in his eyes, a cheap and obvious lie.
After enough years of that, you stop wanting to defend
yourself. The impulse just dies.
He looked at my profile, perfectly calm in the afternoon light,
and felt something in his chest constrict until it hurt, like an
ant nest had been opened inside it.
Vivienne. I won’t protect her. She’s going to pay for what she did.”
I didn’t answer. I started for the parking lot.
hadn’t reached my car when they brought Serena around
the corner in cuffs. She’d tried to run. She hadn’t gotten far.
The instant she spotted Damian behind me she started
crying prettily, right on cue, screaming that she’d been
framed, begging him to hire her the best defense attorneys in the country.
What broke her was this: the man who had never once let
her cry alone didn’t so much as look at her. He stepped in
front of me instead, shoulders squared, alert, like he was
afraid she might get close enough to touch me.
“No
Damian, don’t listen to that bitch, this is all her, she
set the whole thing up! Damian, I’m the one you love, I’m the one-
“Last life, if that bitch hadn’t gotten herself pregnant with
twins behind your back, you would never have ignored me!
Damian, please, save me, I can’t go to prison, I can’t-”
Terror had torn the filter clean out of her. She was screaming
things in a police parking lot that should have died in her throat.
It occurred to me that this was almost certainly the last time
I would ever see her face.
So I raised my hand and slapped her twice, as hard as I have ever hit anything.
Then I smiled at her.
Congratulations on your trip to hell.”
She stood frozen for three full seconds before it registered,
and then she came at me screaming.
The officers didn’t have to move. Damian’s boot caught her
$quare and put her seven feet back into the row of dumpsters
He put everything he had behind it. Blood came out of her
mouth with a tooth in it, and she stayed down on the
pavement like roadkill, unable to lift her chest off the ground.
Vivienne, are you all right-
I was already in my car. I put my sunglasses on and drove out
without checking the mirror.