Therefore, I needed to get real about what in the fuck I was going to do. Harris was right. Someone was going to die before this was over. Fuck, Pete had already died. Funny how I kept forgetting about that. It showed how little he really meant to me. I hadn’t even asked Cristian what he did with his body. For all I knew he was rotting in the basement still.
My choices were not my own. I had innocent people to think about. My best friend and her son.
Jessica had been blowing up my phone for weeks now. I’d been ignoring her calls because I was overcome with guilt over the danger I was putting her in. The danger she didn’t even know she was in.
I’d been sending texts to appease her, but she informed me in her latest voicemail that she was going to my apartment after work to do a ‘wellness check.’
The apartment that I no longer lived in. That had items, clothes that I’d spent years collecting, a lot of money purchasing.
They meant nothing.
I cared about Jessica and Aiden, though. And if I didn’t give her some kind of face time soon, things would get infinitely more complicated. As if that was possible.
I had to protect her from the truth of this. In an ideal world, I would push both Jessica and Aiden away, make sure they were as far away from me, and more importantly Cristian, as possible. But I was selfish. I wasn’t quite ready to lose myself in this world. I needed some kind of tether to goodness. To sanity.
So I finally got back to Jessica, scheduling a dinner with her tonight.
To tell her that I was engaged.
To the man I’d cheated on Pete with. Almost a month ago. What I was going to leave out was that Pete had sold me to a mob boss to pay a debt, and said mob boss was currently threatening her and Eli to make sure I didn’t run. And that I was working with a detective I didn’t entirely trust to take him down. Oh, and the man I was engaged to had brutally tortured and murdered Pete as punishment for selling me in the first place.
The truth was out of the question, but I still wasn’t entirely sure what lies I’d spew to appease her. They’d come to me at the time.
Slipping my diamond hoops into my ear, I regarded myself in the mirror. Everything I was wearing, down to my La Perla underwear, Cristian had bought for me. I didn’t own anything on my body. I didn’t even own that. Every limb, every inch of my skin was his. This realization prickled at my skin, cut at it like razors. Like a thousand tiny cuts slicing over my entire body.
If I thought too hard on what I’d allowed him to do to me, what I’d allowed him to take, I wouldn’t be able to stand. The future stretched out in front of me like a bed of nails. There was no path for me to tread where I wouldn’t open up new wounds. I’d created a prison.
There was only one possible path to freedom. It was going along with the plan I’d laid out when I’d first moved in. When I’d made that call. It was turning over all the evidence that was hidden in a locked drawer in my office. It was putting Cristian and everyone connected to him behind bars.
It was getting revenge for him taking over my life, stealing away my identity and choices.
I had never thought the task was going to be easy. I’d resigned myself to the possibility that what I was doing may result in my death. But I’d been willing to risk that if it meant getting away from him, punishing him for his sins.
But I’d sinned too. By letting him touch me. By thirsting for it. By abandoning the farce that I was fighting him. By moving my clothes into his closet, showering with him, sleeping with him, eating with him, fucking him.
There was no longer a farce.
I was his wife in all the ways that mattered. In every way.
“Where are you going?”
I glanced at the black shape in the mirror, the one I hadn’t noticed while taking in my reflection. Cristian was staring at me, had been watching me for who knew how long.
Though he scared me, I did my best to hide such a response. It wouldn’t do well for my future husband to know how afraid of him I was. How much I loved that fear.
“To dinner.” I swallowed, straightening my shoulders. I didn’t meet his eyes in the mirror. Instead, I focused on my reflection, wiping at a rogue smear of lipstick at the edge of my lips.
“With whom?” His voice was flat, emotionless. But there was something in his eyes. He was pissed. And he was pissed because he was jealous. About me going to dinner.