Poison

I held her face to my chest, and my heart was pounding with rage, so angry and so fucking broken along with her.

I don’t know how long we were sitting there, but the first cracks of dawn were showing through the window when I eased us to our feet and grabbed her a juice from the fridge. Her fingers were still shaking as she took it from me, and she looked so awkward as she slipped a hand down between her thighs.

“It’s ok,” she said, and then she sighed. “I just thought I might have… I had a seizure at the fountain, and I thought I might have…”

My heart broke in two.

She’d been alone, in the cold, in the middle of the night, battling a brain that was failing her after a cunt had failed every fucking thing a fucking man should ever be.

And what if I hadn’t woken up? What if I hadn’t clicked on her details and found her there? It didn’t bear thinking about.

I lit up a cigarette and handed it over. She was grateful. She sucked in a decent drag and pressed herself back against the counter, and I lit up one for myself.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, and there was a new clarity in her eyes as they landed on mine.

It took her a long time to tell me what happened.

Her words were stuttered, and her breaths were hard, but she told me. Every little detail through her pain.

I had to fight back my own rage enough to stay calm, because I wanted to drive right back into fucking town and skin that disgusting cunt alive, but I stayed calm for Anna.

“I thought he loved me,” she said when she reached the end. “I always wanted to think he loved me. But he didn’t. He never did. He doesn’t know what love is. Not really.”

I kept quiet, because I wanted her to carry on. Freely, in the flow, and however she wanted to tell me whatever she needed to say.

Her face crumpled again as she found the next words, and I crumpled inside along with her. But still I kept my calm.

“Oh my God, Lucas…” she said, and held her stomach. “Oh my God, there was so much I never wanted to see… so much I never said… not to anyone… not even to me…”

I said it again.

I took a breath and I said it again, with my hands on her shoulders and my eyes fixed tight on hers.

“Tell me.”

She nodded, with my hands on her shoulders, and her eyes fixed tight on mine.

And then she told me it all.Chapter Thirty-FiveAnnaClarity comes like a butcher’s knife when you least expect it. It slices through everything. The hopes and the fears and the beliefs you take so much for granted as you live your life.

My hopes and my fears and my beliefs had been held very tightly by Sebastian Maitland for a very long time. I’d believed in him. I’d believed he believed in me.

I was wrong.

Lucas was such a support as he sat across from me and listened to my inner voice finally find faith in itself. He was close, and warm, and he listened harder to me than I’d listened to myself in years as my niggle of intuition spiked and pricked.

Sebastian was an evil prince in a beautiful mask. Too slick behind his smile.

Far too slick for anyone to ever see the true ugliness. Least of all me.

I’d been an easy rabbit to snare. A wide-eyed piece of potential roadkill waiting for the truck to hit when he’d found me lost and held out a hand to save me.

He’d started off so kind as he’d picked me up from the floor of my own fucked up dreams. His smile, his touch, his concern.

He’d been the saviour in my storm, and I’d thanked my stars every single minute of every single day that he was in my life.

He’d ask me how my day was, and how I was feeling through the nights. He supported me through the seizures, and the scans and the epilepsy diagnosis.

He’d ask if I was warm enough for the wind outside, and what I’d been eating for lunch at work.

How much I’d slept and if I’d been staring at screens too much, or drinking too little, or whether I should really be watching the things on TV I wanted to be watching so close to bedtime.

Everyone loved him for it.

I loved him for it.

Everyone saw the beautiful mask on his face and nothing more – until his true self started to slip through the veil, but only to me.

It started in the tiny details, far too small to give them note. The pinpricks. So soft at first, you barely feel them.

Asking if you’re warm enough becomes an instruction to wear a warmer coat – and that instruction to wear a warmer coat becomes disapproval if you don’t wear exactly what he wants you to.