Week 366 – Why do you hate me so much?

Finally.

It had been a long eight weeks.

Tony had gotten to the point where he was barely able to function. Guilt over using Natasha and then failing her so drastically was eating him alive.

Given the amount of time she’d been her brother’s prisoner there was no way he could pretend that Natasha wasn’t going to be horribly scarred for life. The woman he’d met that night that felt like a lifetime ago would be gone by now, he just didn’t know who would be in her place.

He was about to find out thought.

Because today was the day. He’d gotten the call he’d been waiting for in the early hours of the morning. Brandon was ready to sell his sister and he’d arranged a meeting at his house. Case wise this couldn’t go any better. He was going to be taken to Brandon’s headquarters which would mean being able to dismantle the whole operation. If you’d asked him a couple of months ago that would have been all he cared about, not he found himself caring less about that and more about getting out the woman who had made this all possible.

It was only because of Natasha that her brother was going to be caught, yet the price she’d paid was much too high.

Now the driver who had been sent to pick him up was pulling into a long driveway, at the end of which sat a gothic mansion. Anxiety and anticipation hummed in his veins. Natasha was in there and as soon as he got her safe he was going to do whatever it took to help her heal.

A man was waiting for him on the front steps, and Tony was led inside, through a myriad of corridors and then down a steep staircase.

Just as he was nearing the bottom, he heard a soft, broken voice whisper, “Why do you hate me so much?”

Natasha’s voice.

She was alive, now he just had to pray she was strong enough to make it through this ordeal and out the other side. If she wasn’t he was never going to be free from the knot of guilt that took up permanent residence in his gut.

He didn’t deserve to be free of it.