AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She giggles. “Then… Yeah, okay.”
“I’ll pick you up at your dorm an hour before it starts.”
She nods, blushing. “That’s perfect. Demi is going home that weekend, so…”
“So I can skip the body armor.”
She grins. “Exactly.” She winces as she looks at her phone. “Shit, I need to run to class.”
“See you then.”
She beams. “Can’t wait.”
That’s the last happy moment I have for a while. Because when the Saturday rolls around, and I knock on Eloise’s dorm room door, whatever high I was on, whatever happiness I’d managed to steal from the universe, turns to ash in my mouth.
When he answers the door.
Ansel.
I look past his shirtless shoulders to see what is instantly burned into my brain forever going on in the room behind him with two of his Order buddies.
She’s wearing a green dress.
She’s moaning even louder than when she was with me.
“You want a turn, bro?” Ansel casually offers. “She’s pretty good.”
She’s not the girl I thought she was. She’s not at all what I thought she was.
So I walk away, and slam up my walls, and never once look back.
And those walls never, ever come back down again.
Present:
Thank fucking God.
Eloise is sitting against one of the planters outside my building’s lobby when I get out of the taxi from Massimo’s place. When she disappeared, and when Massimo came back upstairs alone, I waited as long as I thought I could before making my own exit.
I’ve been trying to reach her for the last hour.
“You weren’t answering your phone,” I growl as I walk toward her.
“It died,” she shrugs. She looks up at me with immense sadness in her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t… I don’t know why I came here.”
I shake my head. “It’s fine.”
“I tried the office first. But it was locked.”
“Yeah, we do that sometimes when it’s closed.”
A smile lifts the corners of her lips as she rolls her eyes. Then she winces and turns to the side.
That’s when the light outside my building’s front door hits the side of her face.
“What the fuck!” I snarl, bolting over to her and gently lifting her chin. There’s no missing the ugly red welt and bruise purpling across the side of her face.
“It’s nothing, Alistair,” she mumbles, avoiding my eyes and trying to turn her face into the shadows again.
