Fear raced like ice through my veins and froze me to the scuffed wooden floors. My knees were weak, my whole body shaking, but I couldn’t make my feet move.
A silhouette darkened a seat at the dining table, sitting prim and tall, hands clasped. Nothing made him disappear. No matter how many times I blinked, he still sat there.
Terror clawed every inch of my neck to silence my scream before I could open my mouth.
“Hello, Lola.” Icy blue eyes lifted to mine, the flicker from the porch just bright enough to light the edge of his cruel smile. “Did you miss me?”
30
She Saw the Devil
Lola
“Lola.” Chris’s voice wasa sweetened razor. “I asked you a question.”
He rose from the table like a snake, slow, deliberate, every movement calculated to intimidate. The mottled shadows of the kitchen didn’t hide his slicked-back blond hair or the perfectly pressed lines of his crisp, white shirt and dark trousers. He’d always worn an expensive skin to conceal the monster underneath.
My glasses slipped down my nose, but I didn’t push them up. And when the icy tips of Chris’s fingers reached out to trail a line of goosebumps down my arm, I didn’t flinch. I didn’t dare.
His head tilted. Waiting. I knew this dance. He wanted a smile to go with the answer to his question.
I forced my lips to curve. “I—I missed you.”
He pressed a soulless kiss to the corner of my mouth. “That’s my girl.”
His girl? Not anymore.
I wasn’t the same shell of a person who’d escaped him six months ago. I was battered around the edges, but I was whole. I was my own person now. Even though fierce determination ignited inside me, I was careful to hide it. I had the scars to prove that challenging Chris never ended well.
His fingers coiled around my arm. He dragged me closer and squeezed me so tight against his chest that the sting of his expensive cologne burned my nose.
“Do you know how upset you made me when I came home from work and you weren’t there?” The dulled ends of his fingernails bit into my skin. “Do you know how embarrassing it was explaining to everyone that you’d disappeared after another one of your…outbursts?”
“You said that when you came home that night, you—you were going to—”
“Oh, Lola. You’ve always been too sensitive. Why can’t you ever remember anything the way it happened?”
I lifted my chin. Defiance boiled beneath my skin. I wouldn’t let him rewrite that moment in our history.
Chris always called me crazy. For a long time, I’d believed him. But my memory still burned with the sharp flash of his eyes as he’d stood over me, belt raised, while I’d shielded myself with nothing but my own bruised arms. He’d said I’d made him late for work for the last time. The ice in his voice had been more than a threat. He’d meant it.
I remembered that moment better than I remembered what I’d had for breakfast. That was the moment I’d vowed he’d never put his hands on me again.
Another slimy kiss pressed to my cheek. “Be a good girl for once.” His fingers twisted tighter around my arm. “Tell me you’re sorry.”
Never.
Chris’s lip twitched. My defiance was unexpected, but his jaw clenched, determination flashing in his cold eyes. The cruel grip of his hand squeezing around my arm reminded me how dangerously close I was to unleashing his anger. I breathed through the pain, but his eyes narrowed, and his hand twisted and twisted.
He broke me.
“I—I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I earned his brittle smile. “Good girl.”
His fingers disappeared from my arm, and he stepped back, dead eyes roaming around the kitchen.
“Lola, this place is a dump.” He pinched my favourite pink tea towel between two fingers and lifted it from the counter as if it were toxic waste. “It’s like a condemned Barbie Dreamhouse. Pink. Flowery. Bullshit. And the mess you left in this kitchen…” Disgust curled his lip. “Some things never change.”
