Poison

“What the hell do we do now?” he asked, but I didn’t have an answer.

“I don’t know what we can do. Nobody will ever accept we’re together. My parents are still screaming for me to get back with Sebastian, and Nicola would slit your throat before she’d sit in your company.”

He sighed. “I wouldn’t blame her.”

Neither would I. She’d watched me through the very dregs and cried with me through every second of it.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Is Maya still trying to make it work?”

It took him a few seconds to answer. “She says not. She says she’s done and over and never wants another night with me, but my mother says that’s bullshit and I should be busting my gut to make it right again. Mother says she still bleats on about the destiny of souls having a higher purpose together every time she gets five minutes.”

“Do you want to make it right again with her?”

“No,” he said, without even a hint of a pause. “I hate how I’m away from Millie, and I hate she uses it as a weapon, but I don’t want another shot at it. I think it does Millie more harm than good to see us together like that. Unfortunately, my mother doesn’t agree with me.”

“This is tough,” I said, stating the obvious.

“Yeah, it’s fucking tough. It’s a fucking joke how fucking tough this is. I don’t even know where we go from here.”

But I did.

As bitter and painful and fucked up as it was, I knew where we went from here.

My fingers reached out for his and squeezed, hands holding tight on the floor between us.

“I love you,” I told him, and meant it. “You are a cunt and a monster and you destroyed my whole world, but I love you. I never stopped loving you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “I was a cunt and a monster and I destroyed your whole world for one stupid mistake that cost us both everything, and a whole host of stupid decisions on top. But I never stopped loving you, Anna.”

“So, what now?” I asked. “What the hell comes after this?”

His sigh was all out of tears, just like I was.

“Dinner,” he said. “Dinner comes after this.”

I let him pull me to my feet right up after him. And I let him hug me tight before we went downstairs.Chapter Twenty-TwoLucasWe stood in silence in the kitchen, the world so heavy between us that we were both out of words. I made lasagne and she was standing there, swamped in my shirt, looking so fucking beautiful and in so much pain it tore me apart all over again.

There was no way out of this.

There was no way Maya would let me out the other side of this with Anna in my arms. Not without holding Millie to ransom.

There was no way my mother would ever hear me out and understand just how much I needed a fresh shot at my old life.

There was definitely no way Jim and Terri would ever accept that their daughter was ditching Sebastian Maitland for the jackass who ripped her to shreds and gave her seizures and stole her soul.

And I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Nicola Henshaw would handle me back on the scene. Probably by doing a lifetime in prison for decapitation.

I felt split in two. On one hand, I was so insanely grateful for the chance to tell her the truth that the relief was burning bright. On the other hand, I was deeper than ever in the pit of self-hate, cursing my own piece of shit mistake all over again with a whole new understanding of just how much I’d fucked her up.

Epilepsy.

A decade of fear, and pity, and her brain hurting so bad she couldn’t live her life anymore.

And I’d done that.

I’d done that to her.

I looked her in the eyes once I’d put the lasagne in to cook, and my self-loathing must have been so visible it didn’t need words.

Her cheeks were still streaked from the tears, and her voice was still wobbly when she spoke, and she still had the ability to read my thoughts without asking questions, even after all this time.

“You didn’t cause the epilepsy,” she told me. “I was already having seizures, they just weren’t that severe.”

“Stop,” I said. “I don’t deserve it. I was a cunt, and I caused everything.”

“You were a cunt, but you didn’t cause everything. Just made it worse.”

I wanted to hold her tight and never let her go, but we were both paper thin and barely capable of standing, and we’d never manage it. Not another round of rocking and sobbing when we didn’t have any tears left to cry.

“I can’t see how we fix this,” she whispered, and it twisted the pang in my ribs a whole load harder.