“Mirand—”
There’s no one there.
I stare at the empty bed before hurrying toward the bathroom. It’s empty as well.
“Linda!” Panic is beginning to fill me as I bound down the stairs, my wolf uneasy. “Where is she?”
Linda looks uncomfortable. “She asked me to book a car for her about twenty minutes after you left.”
The cold moves from my stomach to my spine.
“You booked it?”
“She said you asked her to leave. She wouldn’t even say goodbye to Ethan. He’s been crying ever since.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I roar, and she flinches.
“You were the one who said she would be gone soon. I didn’t know I was supposed to make her stay!”
I stare at the older woman. I did say that. I did say that, but I didn’t mean, I didn’t think—
“What’s the address?” I demand.
Linda picks up her phone from the hall table and reads it to me.
I know that address. I’ve had it sitting in the back of my mind for two months, since I first started looking into Kozlov. She’s going to his office.
I can only think of one reason.
A woman pushed to the edge, stripped of everything. She has no reason to fight anymore.
“Stay with Ethan,” I snarl.
I’m out the door before she can answer.
Chapter Twelve
Miranda
The bed smells like him.
That’s the first thing I notice after the door slams. The echo of it rattles through the walls, and then the house goes quiet. I’m left lying in his bed, in his room, staring at the ceiling of a house I was never supposed to be in, breathing in the leather-and-something scent of a man who just told me, very clearly, that I am a problem he is done solving.
I don’t cry. I don’t have it in me.
That’s the second thing I notice. The absence of feeling. Like someone reached in and turned a dial all the way down to zero, and now there’s just this gray quiet where the pain should be. I’ve felt it before. The last time was in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, a doctor’s voice somewhere above me, and the slow realization that my mother was gone and I was the only one left.
I thought I knew what losing everything felt like. Turns out it comes in more than one form.
The job. The hospital. The contract. The debt that never gets smaller no matter how many shifts I work, no matter how many things I give up to throw money at it. My apartment, which was barely an apartment. My mother, two years ago. Everything I’ve ever tried to hold on to has found a way to leave.
And now this.
I stare at the ceiling and think about Grayson’s face right before he walked out.
I always knew that I was someone that was easily abandoned. I’ve never had great luck with depending on people. So when did I start counting on Grayson? Why did I let him force his way into my life? Maybe because apart from Brooke, he was the first person to pay attention to me, to worry about me. The stupid, foolish part of me thought that meant something. That part of me forgot my place in this world.
His cold voice sounds in my head again, and I stare blankly at the ceiling.
