Chapter 11
Harris
The party had been over for more than an hour. Jace and Kin had stuck around, keeping me company while my staff straightened up the mess that had been left over. When Kin started yawning, however, Jace talked her into letting him give her a ride home.
For about a minute, I worried about Jace and whether or not Kin would actually commit murder. She hadn’t been happy in the least when she’d walked out the back door with my friend. Shaking my head, I decided Jace was a big boy and could handle himself with the gorgeous redhead.
After making sure the club was clean, I locked up and headed home. I wasn’t exhausted, nowhere close to it, and I doubted I’d get much sleep that night. Not when my body was still on high alert. I’d been counting down the days until Lucy was legal and now that she was, my body was ready to take that next step.
I’d been thankful for her parents taking her home earlier. If I’d been the one to drive her home, it would have been to my house and not hers. Jesse Thornton might be okay with me dating his only daughter¸ but I doubted he would accept that I took her back to my place and devoured her within hours of her becoming eighteen.
Unlocking the door to the apartment I shared with Jenna, I was surprised to hear the TV on in the living room. Jenna had texted me when she got home to let me know she was going to bed. Tensing, I realized that it was Tessa sitting on the couch watching some kind of late-night trashy movie.
Fucking hell.
The apartment was huge, but seriously, it wasn’t big enough to put enough distance between me and Tessa. The length of the country wasn’t enough distance. I hated that bitch and was beyond glad that Jenna was calling it quits with her the next day. Maybe with her gone I would decide to stay instead of moving out at the end of the month.
I ignored her as I went into the kitchen and pulled out the container of sweet tea that Jenna had made that morning. No one made sweet tea like Jenna. There was barely a glass left and I swallowed half of it in one gulp. Huh, it tasted bitter. Shrugging, because I figured Jenna had just gotten distracted and let the tea sit too long in the maker, I gulped down the rest and bypassed the living room as I went to bed.
I needed a shower, but wanted to text Lucy first.
Hope you always remember this birthday, sweetness. I love you. Always.
She didn’t respond, but I knew she wouldn’t. She’d been out cold when I’d walked the Thorntons to their car earlier. She hadn’t even moved when I’d brushed a kiss over her closed eyes. Blowing out a frustrated breath, because all I wanted right then was for Lucy to be in my bed waiting for me, I stood.
Looked like I was going to have to take care of the pain in my body myself.
I’d barely taken a step toward my bathroom when a wave of dizziness hit me. It was strong enough to make me stumble and I stopped, blinking as the world around me dimmed and grew blurry. Fuck, what the hell was wrong with me? Reaching for the post at the end of my bed, I grasped it and eased myself down onto the end of my mattress.
This feeling was familiar, but at the same time completely foreign. It reminded me of the days when all I lived for was getting high. It had been a phase in my life that hadn’t lasted long, but it was something I was never likely to forget.
But this? It was like being high magnified by a hundred.
Moaning, because the room was staring to spin, I fell back onto the mattress. This was wrong. Something was wrong. I knew it, but there was nothing I could do about it. Not when every time I lifted my head I felt like I was going to fall off the face of the Earth and float into space. It was a scary feeling. Terrifying.
Thinking I needed to call my parents, I thought I heard my bedroom door open. For a moment I even thought there was someone in my room. “Jenna?” I heard my voice, but it sounded like it was coming from a deep well.
My last thought before I lost all cognitive reasoning was that I was in serious trouble.
Chapter 12
Lucy
My phone was buzzing. Every few seconds I’d hear it go off and knew, even as I fought against the pull of sleep, that I was getting text messages. I didn’t want to wake up from the dream I’d been having. It was too good to want to leave it behind.
My phone and whoever was blowing it up didn’t seem to care, though.
Moaning, I reached out blindly for the annoying thing and slowly lifted one eye as I found it. Bringing it close, I saw on my locked screen that it was Harris, but there were no messages, just what looked like videos. Smiling, I unlocked the phone and pulled up the first video.
Five seconds later the smile was gone and I was fighting back the urge to vomit.
No, my heart screamed, denying what my brain was seeing. No, he wouldn’t do something like that. Not to me.
The first video lasted barely thirty seconds. I knew what was going on in it, could see my boyfriend with his hands all over the chick I recognized as Tessa. It was just hard to comprehend. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept this as the truth.
Maybe she was using some kind of video-editing software and that wasn’t really Harris. Please, let that be it.
There were ten videos, each anywhere from thirty to sixty seconds long, and taking up exactly where the previous one left off. Like the masochist that I was, I watched each and every one