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“Sweetheart, I never had any intention of just leaving you here and not checking up on you. I want you to let me know once you decide what you’re going to do. If you change your mind and want to come and stay with me and my family, the offer is open indefinitely,” he says, reaching over and squeezing my hand comfortingly.
“Thank you,” I choke out, my voice cracking as tears fill my eyes. He squeezes my hand again and then climbs out of the car, opening my door like he has a thousand times before. He grabs my case from the trunk, then escorts me into the hotel.
The staff eyed me warily, politely ignoring the state of my face, despite their obvious curiosity. I’m sure I’m not the first person they’ve had check in who looks like she just went two rounds with a cage fighter, but I still haven’t seen my own reflection, so maybe I do look worse than I imagine.
With my room key in hand, I reach for my case.
“I can bring it up to your room,” Mark says.
I smile and sigh. “I can manage, Mark. This is your night off, you should be with your family.”
“I don’t like leaving you here, Miss Izzy. You need people to take care of you, and my wife…well, Ronnie, she knows how much I worry about you,” he says, his brow furrowed and his lips turned down into a worried frown.
Pressing a soft kiss to his cheek, I smile shakily. “Thank you, Mark. Tell Ronnie I said thank you to her too.”
Nodding, his lips are turned down into a frown as I take the case from him and head for the elevators, smiling and lifting my hand in a small wave as the doors close on me, leaving me all alone.
22
GULLIVER
With my cell pressed to my ear, I listen as Izzy’s number goes straight to voicemail for the twentieth time today. I’ve been calling and texting her constantly since she left my place on Saturday, but she’s ignoring me. I thought about going to her house, but I’d rather not risk having another argument with her in front of her toxic family.
But now it’s Monday again, and she’s still not turned her cell back on. To be honest, I’ve never even seen her with a phone, and I only know she has one because she gave Fitzy the number. The clothes he picked out for her are still at my house. He was going to have them delivered to her parents’ house, but I convinced him to have them sent back to mine in the hope that she’d contact him to ask about them, but she hasn’t.
When the Rhodeses’ town car pulls up outside the school, I push away from my car and stride toward it, watching as a driver I’ve never seen before climbs out of the driver’s seat and goes to open the rear door.
I immediately move to the other rear door and open it, expecting to see Izzy waiting for her sister to leave before she circles back like she’s done in the past, but the seat is empty. Closing the door, I look up and only find Penelope talking to her crowd of minions at the bottom of the steps.
“Where’s Izzy?” I ask, stomping over to Penelope and interrupting her conversation.
“I don’t know,” she says dismissively.
“What?”
Throwing me a poisonous glare, she turns her back on me and carries on her conversation, like I’m nothing but an annoying insect.
“Hey,” I snarl, reaching for her shoulder and spinning her around to look at me. “Where the fuck is Izzy? Her cell’s been turned off since Saturday.”
“Why would I know where she is? She’s your fiancée. Surely you should be keeping better track of her,” Penelope spits angrily before pulling out of my grip and striding away.
As I watch her go, nerves and unease fill my stomach. Penelope is a fucking bitch, but she’s not usually bitchy to me. I have a really bad feeling that something has happened, and guilt and fear are pushing me to find my fiancée and make sure she’s okay.
I scan the halls for Izzy until the bell for homeroom rings, then I ignore my own class and head to hers, hoping to find her hiding behind her waterfall of blonde hair, but her desk is empty. I’m not sure why I’m expecting to see her walking through the halls when I’ve spent three-and-a-half years at the same school as her and only seen her a couple of times. But the thing is, with Izzy, once you know who she is, it’s hard not to see her, not to search for her.
By the time lunch rolls around, I’m starting to get really fucking angry. She can’t just disappear; she’s my fucking fiancée now, and I want to see her, damn it. Stomping into the lunchroom, I make a beeline straight for Penelope, with Kip, Davis, and Thorn trailing behind me. I swear Kip is more upset than me about Izzy not being here, and if I wasn’t so angry at her for going AWOL and fucking radio silent, I’d have punched him for brooding over my fiancée.
“Penelope, we need a word,” I say through clenched teeth, my hands braced on the table beside her.
“I’m eating,” she says, not even bothering to turn her head and look at me while she stabs her fork into a tiny bowl of salad.
Leaning down, I get in her face. I’m so much angrier than the situation warrants, but I want to know where the fuck Izzy is, and Penelope is the only person who can tell me. “I don’t give a fuck what you’re doing. You’re going to come and talk to me for a fucking minute or I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” I growl.
Turning to glare at me, her face pales a little when she sees my expression. She silently pushes back her seat and gracefully rises until she’s standing next to me. Her face is so eerily similar, yet so different to Izzy’s.
Like the uppity Little Miss Goody Two Shoes she is, she leads the way out of the cafeteria, the sound of her heels clacking along the wooden floor lost amid the noise of the busy lunchroom. I follow behind her, with my friends matching pace at my side, until we’re halfway down the corridor and away from anyone who could overhear our conversation.
“Where is she hiding?” I snap the moment she stops and turns to look at me. “I know she’s like a fucking ghost at this school, but you must know where she’s hiding.”
