Page 43 of Stag

*Are you okay?* Henley signed as I looked at him again, my mind whirling over all the things I’d miss, and all the things that’d driven me to this decision.

“I love my twin. I just don’t get why she’s become so overbearing. I’m not her burden. I’m her sister!”

He nodded, pondering for a moment before he signed again.

*Maybe she’s convinced herself that the roles or dynamics have changed, and she needs this reset to remember she’s your sister.*

Maybe. I picked up my phone, twirling it in my fingers morosely.

“She’s not all bad. She may have broken my old phone, but she bought me this one to replace it. Even had it all set up for me before she gave it to me.” It was switched off for the moment, but it may be my only link to her.

A hand snatched it from me, and my head shot up in surprise.

“What… why did you… what’s going on?”

Henley stared grimly at it. “She knew where you were last night. You said she follows you around, and she gave you this phone, already set up. Can I get our tech guys to check it for you?”

He was speaking because his hand was busy, but I caught every word. He wanted to check it for what?

“I don’t understand.”

“She might be using it to track you, or spy on you.” Cold dread seemed to pour down on me, my head, then my shoulders, chilling with sudden fear. My hands trembled as I twisted them together in my lap. It was insane, but it sounded feasible. Possible, even. Would she do that?

“Why?” I breathed, misery filling me at the very thought of her using the gift she gave me as a method of following me, controlling me.

Henley tapped my knee to get my attention.

“She cares, but I think she’s gone too far. This? This is obsession. This isn’t safe, Claudia.”

I felt Stag sit down beside me, his arm looping around me to hold me close, letting me steal his warmth, since my own seemed to have fled. I watched his lips as he stared at me.

“What happened?”

I swallowed hard, glancing at the innocent looking phone in Henley’s hand. Or rather, the formerly innocent looking phone, since it now looked like a tool of cruelty and possession.

“He thinks Marissa was using my phone to track me.”

Stag’s jaw tightened and his arm seemed to tighten involuntarily as he looked at Henley. I could see his lips just enough to pick up certain words. The ones with hard sounds, if I could have heard them.

I caught ‘bitch’, and what looked like various swearwords, and then he looked at me again, his tension softening as he met my eyes.

“I’m sorry, love. It’s probably just as well you couldn’t hear all that. I just lost my shit.”

I nodded and leaned my face against his shoulder. I didn’t want to see any more of what they were saying. I wanted to hide in the silence for a while, and pretend it wasn’t happening. That I wasn’t running from my twin sister, my only familiar person in this entire city, and hiding out with a man I barely knew, and a bunch of complete strangers.

Chapter Seventeen

Henley and Glory left a few hours after they helped us get settled in. I had the code for the external door, and the one for the garage, both different, and a third one for the door between the garage and the damn house. The guy was security obsessed, but it was a relief, because it meant that the crazy bitchtwin couldn’t get in here, even if she’d tracked Claudia to this address.

It pissed me off beyond measure that she’d been tracking her sister like that. It wasn’t a guess anymore. It was fact. It took Grease exactly five minutes to find two tracking apps on the phone. Two.

Claudia was quiet, too quiet, like she was sinking into a fucking cloud of despair, and I had no idea how to help her. I’m the prick who doesn’t connect with people in the right ways. The one who always upsets people, even when I’m trying to be nice. How the hell do I cheer up a woman who looks like she lost everything? She lost the other half of herself, technically, so, how the hell do I fix that?

She was trying to hide how much she was hurting, so I made tea, and sat with her to watch a movie, which I’d seen many times before, and it turns out, she’d seen it too. Not that it’s a surprise, it’s a great fucking movie.

“Why are we watching it again? You could watch something different?”

She offered me a small smile, pointing at the TV as she spoke. “Subtitles. If I read those, I miss a lot of the actual film, or if I watch the film, I can only read lips if they’re facing toward the camera, so I usually watch things at least twice, so I get the full experience.”