Her Billionaire Father Spoils Her Rotten novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Bus Station

A billionaire and his bodyguard find her in the Chicago bus terminal; he sees her mother's eyes, then the scar on her wrist.

The Chicago bus terminal at six in the morning smelled like floor cleaner and burnt coffee.

I sat on a steel bench by gate nine with my hands in my hoodie sleeves.

The clerk in Toledo had sold me flip-flops off the gift rack for eleven dollars.

My feet were blue.

I had not slept, and I kept the hidden phone pressed to my ribs.

*Do not move. I am coming.*

I had read it maybe two hundred times.

A man could say that and be anyone.

He could be a liar, or a cop, or someone worse than Dwight.

I had only ever known one kind of grown-up, and I wasn't going to be fooled twice.

So I sat near the security desk, where there were cameras, and watched every door.

At 6:14 the glass doors by the taxi stand banged open.

A man in a long navy coat came through them at a run.

He was tall and gray at the temples, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.

He wasn't wearing a tie.

Behind him came a second man, much bigger, with a shaved head and a short light-brown beard.

He scanned the whole terminal in one pass and found me in about a second.

Then the first man saw me, and he stopped so hard that the second almost walked into him.

He stood in the middle of the terminal with people streaming around him.

I knew he was Dominic Garrow.

I knew it the way you know your own hand in the dark.

He had my eyes.

Gray-blue, a little too wide, and tired in the exact same way.

I had looked at those eyes in the bathroom mirror for twenty-two years.

I got to my feet, and my legs shook.

I didn't go to him.

He didn't come any closer, either.

He took three steps and stopped at a polite distance.

"Abby," he said.

His voice cracked down the middle of the name.

"How do you know my name?"

"It was on the match." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I should have asked you what you wanted to be called."

"Abby's fine."

"Abby." He said it again like he was learning it. "I'm Dominic."

"I know."

"Of course you do."

He laughed, and it was wet, and he wiped his face with his wrist.

"I told myself the whole drive that I wouldn't cry on you."

"You're doing a bad job."

"I know."

Something in my chest let go a little.

Not much.

The big man behind him cleared his throat quietly and said, "Sir. Gate cameras. We should move."

"Right." Dominic nodded. "Abby, this is Jonas. He works for me. He keeps people safe. He drove."

"I drove," said Jonas.

His voice was low and dry and bored.

He looked at me a moment longer than he looked at the doors.

I looked back, because I wasn't going to look away first.

He had a chipped front tooth and a small, flat scar through his left eyebrow.

I thought, he has seen worse than me.

I did not feel safer.

"I'm not getting in your car," I said.

"All right."

"I don't know you."

"That's true."

"People say they want to help. Then they want something."

Dominic's face did something awful.

It looked as if I had put a hand through his ribs.

"What do you want from me?" I said. "Tell me now. I'd rather know."

He didn't take long.

"To look at you," he said. "That's all. I've got no right to anything else."

I stared at him.

"I didn't know you existed," he said. "I was told you didn't."

"The woman I loved went away when I was twenty-nine. I was told she lost the baby."

"I looked for her for three years. I found a death record in Toledo and nothing else."

"And this morning a stranger's message on a website says I have a daughter."

"My mother," I said. "Is that the woman?"

"Yes."

"What was her name?"

He opened his mouth, and Jonas said, quietly, "Not in a bus station, sir."

"No. You're right." Dominic pressed his knuckles to his mouth. "Abby, there's a car outside, and a house, and a bed."

"I'll buy you anything you can name. And you can say no to every bit of it."

"I'll put you on a bus home myself, the minute you ask."

"I don't have a home to go to."

He went very still.

Jonas, over his shoulder, went still too.

I realised I had said too much.

I tugged my sleeves down over my hands.

The old reflex made me yank the left one, and the right cuff rode up my forearm.

It was only a second.

The terminal lights were bright.

Dominic looked down at my wrist.

At the pale, shiny oval of the iron scar, the size of a man's thumb, white against my skin.

I watched him read it.

I watched him look at the flip-flops and the blue toes.

I watched him see the bruise on my other wrist, in the shape of Dwight's fingers.

I watched him add it up.

He didn't shout.

His voice came out so quiet that people at the next gate didn't turn.

"Who did this?" he said.

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