What the heck was he doing there?
And why did she have to run into him for the first time in twelve years after she’d just been through another trauma?
Granted, this one wasn't nearly as horrific as what had happened to her when she was seventeen, but nonetheless, walking into her home and finding it trashed was definitely violating. After calling her boss, Raven Oswald, head of the Cyber Team and the second-oldest of the six Oswald siblings who owned the company, she’d called the cops. When they arrived, she went up with them to her place, they cleared it, found it was empty, and took her statement.
A crime scene unit was coming to look for fingerprints, DNA, or anything else that might lead them to the perpetrators, butTeresa wasn't holding out any hope that they’d actually find anything. Leaving them to do their thing, she’d called an Uber and come straight into the office. There was no way she was going to risk walking or taking public transportation, not after what had happened to Tobias and Isabella a couple of days ago.
Now she was there, and all she’d wanted was to be surrounded by the people and things that made her feel safe, and get to work doing what she could to identify the people who had invaded her home and destroyed it.
The absolute last thing she needed was to run into that particular blast from the past.
Micah.
There.
At Prey.
Why?
It wasn't because he knew she was there, because if he did, he wouldn't have been shocked to see her. There would be no reason for him to care where she was anyway. After all, he hadn't even cared that she’d been violently gang raped by her brother’s friends just so he could sell her body for money to buy drugs. Micah had wiped her out of his life like she’d never existed while she was still in the hospital, attempting to come to terms with what had happened to her.
Nope, no chance he was there for her.
So what was he doing there?
That question was still running through her mind as she reached the Cyber Team floor and headed out of the elevator and down the corridor to their shared office space. Although they all technically had their own offices, they never used them, preferring instead to work together in different corners of the larger space.
At least she’d done her best to convince Micah that she didn't remember him.
Wasn't likely to fool him forever, but so what? She needed to save face at least a little bit, and what better way to do that than pretending like he meant so little to her back then that over a decade later, she no longer knew who he was?
“You okay?”
Caught off-guard by the sudden voice and figure rushing toward her while she was still shaken up by everything that had happened that night, Teresa took a panicked step back.
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s only me.”
Blinking, she saw Ava’s worried face come into view. Behind her friend was Ava’s boyfriend Nathaniel, also looking at her with concern.
“Uh, sorry, guess I'm a little preoccupied,” she murmured, hoping there was no way they could know it wasn't just the break-in that had her on edge.
Of course, they couldn’t know.
How could they?
While her friends did know what had happened to her when she was a teenager, she’d never added in the part about how her boyfriend at the time had bailed without a word. Refused to see her, blocked her on all platforms, and moved away, never to return. They assumed her reluctance to date was because of the fact she’d been raped, and while that was definitely part of it, it was more the broken heart that had her locking up her heart to protect it.
There was no way they could know the man downstairs had once meant something to her. Once meanteverythingto her.
“I’m so sorry you had to see that on your own,” Ava said.
“I’m not. I'm glad you weren't there, you’ve already been through so much,” she told her friend, snapping out of her Micah-induced stupor to hug Ava. Personally, Teresa was more of a no-touch kind of person, but Ava and Chelsea were like hersisters, and both of them loved hugs, so she was always happy to hand them out when the occasion called for it.
Like right now.
“Still, you shouldn’t have been there on your own. What if they’d still been there?” Ava continued, hugging her back, hard.
“Then I would have turned and run, or defended myself,” she replied. After her assault, even before she’d come to work with Prey and taken part in mandatory self-defense classes, she’d learned how to use what she had to her advantage. She couldn’t grow her five-foot-one frame any taller, and she couldn’t out-muscle most men, but she could make the most of what she had.
