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“I know. It’s them, it’s always them. I want to kill them for this, I really do,” she says, suddenly pulling me into a hug.
“It was them,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around her and holding her just as tightly as she’s holding me.
“Princess,” Hawthorn says quietly, startling me. Lifting my tear-filled eyes, I find him standing in the doorway.
“I’ll give you guys a minute,” Izzy says, kissing my cheek softly, then climbing up from the floor and leaving the room.
Taking her place beside me on the floor, Hawthorn sighs. “Penelope,” he breathes, like he literally has no idea what else to say.
“I don’t have an eating disorder,” I say.
“Tell me,” he quietly demands.
“She was so obsessed with me being thin. She told me over and over that I needed to be perfect, that everything needed to be perfect so I could land the richest husband and gain the most power. She told me that no one would want me if I was fat, that if I couldn’t control what I put in my mouth, then I deserved to lose the money. That I’d ruin our entire family just because I was too selfish to not eat. If I ever said I was hungry, she’d berate me, showing me pictures of all the society girls who were prettier and thinner than me. Then she’d list all the ancient, perverted old men that she’d offer me too if I was too fat to land someone like Gulliver. One day she caught me eating some popcorn—I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I was so hungry. She got really mad and dragged me into the bathroom and forced her fingers down my throat until I puked up everything I’d eaten that day. Then she kept me in the house, canceled all our plans, and told the housekeeper I was too sick to eat.”
“They starved you?” he asks bluntly, his voice steely and dangerous.
“Yes. She had these pills that make you sick too. They give you the symptoms of a stomach flu, and she’d make me take them, then laugh at me when I was so sick I was throwing up blood. She’d tell me at least I was thin. It didn’t take long until I stopped trying to cheat at my diet. When my periods stopped because I was so malnourished, she increased my calorie allowance from seven hundred to nine hundred calories a day, but by that point, food had just become a necessary evil. In the picture she gave them for in the article, she was standing behind me, forcing me to purge because she caught me eating a candy bar. I had one bite, that’s all, and she found out. She didn’t let me eat anything for three days, and the whole time she was telling me how fat and ugly and worthless I was. I couldn’t fight back; I couldn’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me? So, I just did what I was told and ate what I was told because I had no other choice.”
I wait for Hawthorn to say something, but he stays eerily silent, his jaw clenched, his eyes hard, and staring at the wall.
“I know I should have fought back?—”
“Don’t. Just don’t,” he snarls, snapping his head in my direction so quickly I actually jump. “They fucking tortured you, they made food a weapon. They need to die, I want to fucking kill them, both of them.”
“They’re not worth it,” I whisper, twisting around to face him. “We won, I broke the will, and now they don’t get a penny. Let them say what they want, they don’t control me anymore.”
“It’s not the point, they’re evil, fucking evil.”
“I know, but there’s a lot of evil people in the world. We can mess with them, aggravate them, and embarrass them. Then we walk away.”
“No, they deserve—” he hisses.
“Yes, they do,” I sigh. “But if we give them the power to keep hurting us, then they win, and I refuse to let them win anymore. I know that getting revenge was my idea, but if we just stop, they’ll leave, and we can move on with our lives. We can grow up and be happy and move forward without them. In the end, it’ll just be them and their money growing old, alone and miserable together. The best kind of revenge we can get is to make them insignificant,” I whisper, leaning forward and pressing a soft kiss to his lips.
Gradually, the tension in his jaw loosens, and he kisses me back. “We can’t let it go,” he rasps against my lips. “Not yet.”
“We’ll do all we’ve planned, we’ll mess with them and try to take the company, but if it doesn’t work, then we forget them, we pretend they don’t exist. Izzy will marry Gulliver, and she’ll be a Winslow, and I might change my name too; I’ll be Penelope Smith or something, and then the Rhodes name won’t be my problem or my legacy, it can die with them.”
“Penelope Benedict sounds pretty good to me,” Hawthorn purrs, his thumb running over my lower lip.
“Maybe one day.” I smile.
“One day works for me.”
33
HAWTHORN
Smiling reassuringly at Penelope, I leave her with her sister on the patio, then head for the den, where the guys are looking for a movie to watch later.
“I’m going to kill them,” I growl the moment I step foot inside.
“There’s no way we can make it happen without it coming back on us or the girls, I already tried to figure out a way when Barnaby beat the shit out of Izzy,” Gulliver says, his posture rigid and angry as he closes the distance between us and pulls me in for a hug.
His fist slams against my back, and I feel some of the tension that’s coiled inside me relax.
“Princess wants to walk away, she wants to change her surname and forget they exist, but I can’t do it. She’s mine, and I can’t let them get away with this, I just can’t,” I snarl.
