The Woman from the Past (Grassi Framily)

I was so damn sure.

Feeling the sting of tears in my eyes, I shook my head hard, as if I could shake the negative feelings away.

Dropping down, I uncapped my vitamin bottles, pulling out the stuffing inside, then tossing it, making it look like I’d already started to follow doctor’s orders. Every day, I would take out the pills and either take them, or flush them.

Because I never knew if Colin would one day want to count them to make sure I was taking them.

With a sigh, I took one of each of the pills and swallowed them down with some water. I mean, I had a headache coming on anyway. Might as well see if they worked at all.

I walked across the apartment, looking at the living space with its appropriate location for the time of day, before ultimately deciding to drop into the bed, and pulling up the blankets like a cocoon.

There was a time and a place for appropriate seating. Sometimes you just needed to curl into bed and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist.

When you very likely just failed at the one thing you set all your hopes on, it was time to escape, to wallow, to let it out, so you could think straight again.

I’d never had the easiest of lives. But in the past, I’d always been a “glass half full” kind of person. I could usually see the sunny side of any situation.

I’d never struggled with my mental health, or felt the need to “take to the bed.”

Since being stuck with Colin, though? Yeah, I took to the bed a lot. I found myself burrowing deeper and deeper into a well of despair and depression that was hard to climb back out of.

The only thing that pulled me out sometimes was one of my brothers tossing me their phone so I could get back to my search and plan.

Planning, and the small sliver of hope that brought along with it, had kept me going for years.

If I didn’t hear from the Grassi Family in the next few weeks, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going to get me out of bed.

Aside from one of the guards saying that Colin demanded my presence at the dinner table, that is.

For the next few hours, all I could do was go over the morning in my mind, replaying all the things that had been said, trying to figure out if I could have said something different to get Massimo to have agreed.

Had I been too pushy?

Not pushy enough?

Too desperate?

Not confident?

By the time I heard the footsteps coming up to the apartment, ready to beckon me to dinner, I had just came to the same conclusion for the tenth time.

I’d done and said everything exactly the way I could have given the situation.

And even if I hadn’t, it wasn’t like I could go back and change things.

“Yo, he’s ready for you,” the guard said, nodding his chin at me as I climbed out of bed and reached up to straighten my hair.

“Coming,” I said, exhaling hard as I moved across the apartment to step back into my shoes.

It was then that I saw something stuck against the tongue between my laces.

Making sure the guard wasn’t looking, I reached down and fished out the silky-soft, creamy white material.

A single petal of a calla lily.

I rubbed it between my two fingers, thinking of him—the man who’d killed my boyfriend—one last time.

It was right then that I’d come to the conclusion.

I was never going to see Massimo Grassi again.

So it was time to go back to the drawing board, and work out a new plan.

And forget all about Massimo Grassi, the mess he got me in, and those damned hypnotic eyes of his.