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My heart stills, literally stills.
My hand protectively covers the photo like that will do anything.
Never in my life has a threat ever hurt this brashly. In a matter of minutes my entire world is turning, rotating again on its axis, and I have no one else to blame.
I did this. Me.
I ruined us.
“You wouldn’t,” I rage, even though I know the truth. Deeply it settles, rooting as the idea has longer to form in her demented mind.
She would.
She’d do something to my daughter.
Lorna licks at her lips, the action like a snake pushing its tongue past its teeth right before it’s set to strike. Anticipating the kill.
“Break it off with Lillian. No contact with her and yourotherchild willstayunharmed.” The way she says other, like the one she’s carrying is somehow superior, disgusts me more than I already am.
The muscles in my core clench tighter than they already are. Knowing better than to call her bluff this time.
Her eyes are as dead as her conscience before she sets the nail to its coffin. My fate already sealed within its grave.
“Marry me, Abram.”
seven
Rory
“Whatdoyoumean?I’m not taking it back,” Abram demands, offended. Pushing the book back to my side.
“I can’t keep it.”
“Why not?” he asks through clenched teeth.
“Because somehow in spite of neither of us knowing how, I ended up with it.” It doesn’t feel right keeping it anymore.
“Well, I don’t want it.”
This comment piques my interest. The statement carrying a set of claws when he’d worked so hard to get it in the first place.
“Why not?”
“Because Rory, that book doesn’t matter anymore. I already have what I want. My daughter is here, where she’s always belonged. I don’t need anything else.”
I swallow around the lump in my throat, that I swear feels like it’s covered in needles. What? Where I’ve always belonged? Doesn’t need anything else?
“I don’t need it, you keep it,” Abram adds after another moment. The air at the moment is so full it clings, hanging here between us in a sensation I don’t understand to pick apart.
Whatever it is though, it’s pivotal, I understand that much. Abram who could win without mercy, kill without attacking, and be ruthless to a fault is none of those things as of current.
A shadow of something casts over his eyes, but I don’t understand what it means until his mouth opens again. The brittle words are spoken under his breath, but somehow, that makes them all the more daunting in this too-large room.
“Bothof you belonged here.”
I stare because that’s all I can do. I don’t blink or breathe. Just stare.
Even my nerves, as fried as they are, can’t seem to move. The blood inside my vein stalling abruptly.
