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“Stop threatening me with suicide,” the man is saying, and it’s not West. Now that I hear him better, this voice is deeper, older and quite different. “It doesn’t work on me, you hear? Didn’t work any other time you tried.”
“You’re a bastard.”
“I saved your goddamn reputation, telling everyone you’re my daughter, taking you and the boy in, feeding you both, keeping you clothed, keeping a roof over your heads. Don’t expect anything more from me.”
What the hell?
“You have a responsibility, too,” she snarls, and there’s a small thump. Then another.
“Stop that. I’m done with you.”
A wail.
Bile rises in my throat. Oh fuck. What’s going on here? Where’s West? What’s wrong with this family?
I slip out of the apartment and start down the stairs, stopping every couple of steps to lean on the rail and try and catch my breath, familiar panic shaking me. I can’t get out of here fast enough, and then I’m hurrying to the bus stop and catching a bus home.
On the way there, I take out my phone, scroll to West’s number and stare at it. What do I say? What do I ask?
Where do I start?
How does it end?
Before I manage to text or call, I fall asleep on the bus, forehead pressed to the cool glass of the window. I end up missing my fucking stop, so I have to double back a mile. By the time I get home, I’m so beat I can barely walk straight. I make my way upstairs and stand in the empty living room, listening to the familiar hum of the apartment.
Our apartment.
Nothing sinister here. Nothing incomprehensible, like the words I overheard that keep bubbling up to the surface of my thoughts, words I’m trying real hard not to think about right now—about West and his grandfather, or whoever that old guy is.
Not tonight.
As I pass by Nate’s room, I glance inside the half-open door, and I see him curled up with Syd beside him. I linger for a few moments, itching to join them. Curl up in a bed with them, not alone, to feel their warmth, their presence.
I’ve never seen them asleep together. Did she wake up and go look for him? Did he call out for her in his sleep? Did he find a way to overcome his instinctive reaction and sleep with her, kiss her, fuck her?
Hugging the doorframe, I imagine them together, moving and sliding against each other, her red hair and his dark mop, her pale curves and his muscular back, and desire streaks through me, getting my dick hard and heavy.
Desire and bitterness. I’d been afraid of talking to Syd tonight, but I’d also been dying to see her, be with her, hold her and now she is in Nate’s arms.
Does this mean she made her choice?
Sleep is calling me, even if my mind is buzzing. I make my slow way to bed and drop on top of the mattress, clothes and boots and all, kicking the bunched-up covers off, to the floor.
Blackness draws me under fast. One moment I’m staring at the faint light coming through the slats, and the next I’m falling over a cliff and down a black pit, a ravine, tumbling head over feet, unable to find purchase, terror chasing me.
Chandeliers are swinging.
Strong wind is blowing.
Blood rises in a crimson tide, filling up the pit and I sink down, drowning, dying, not breathing.
Nobody’s breathing. Bodies. Corpses. Death.
I can’t fucking breathe. Hands are grabbing at me, dragging me down to the bottom, and I’m dying, too. I’m dying—
Gasping, I jerk and roll on my side, away from the grasping hands. “Kto tam?”
My voice’s so shot to hell, hoarse and threadbare, it doesn’t even sound like mine.
