Page 43 of Glorious Sinner

There was no way to sugarcoat it. Willa could handle it. Jude worked dangerous cases, doing things that made Willa sick with worry all the time. If anyone would understand, it was her. “I’m not sure, but I think Tomas might do something…um, my ex showed up here earlier and I think he might—”

“He didn’t tell you where he was going?” she said.

“I was asleep when he left, and I’m kinda freaking out.”

“He’s with Jude. I promise you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Willa said. “The guys from the agency are helping him with Ryan. They won’t let him do anything reckless.”

I slumped back in Tomas’s big chair. “Thank God.”

“Your man’s kind of intense, huh?”

Willa had worked at the club when Tomas used to come in for his dances, so she’d witnessed that side of him firsthand. “You could say that,” I said.

Willa chuckled but sobered quickly. “It will be okay. Jude will make sure he doesn’t end up in an orange jumpsuit. He promised me nothing bad would happen.” She snorted. “And that man never breaks a promise.”

Her voice had softened talking about her guy, and I loved that my friend had found someone as good as Jude. They were perfect for each other.

“Did Tomas tell you he helped me out a while back?” Willa said.

I sat forward. “No, he didn’t say anything.”

“All that trouble I had with Trent—the blackmail. I went to Tomas for a loan, and instead of holding me to it, he went to Jude.” There was a beat of silence. “If he hadn’t done that…yeah, I can’t even bear to think about where I might be now, what my life would be.”

Trent was Willa’s brother-in-law, and Willa had been raising his and her sister’s daughter since her sister died. Trent decided to use his child, Tilly, to blackmail Willa when he got out of prison for dealing drugs. Things had gotten really bad. But she’d finally allowed Jude in, had trusted him, and since then her world had changed for the better.

I gripped the phone tighter. “He did that?” I knew Tomas did a lot of things that weren’t exactly legal, and I knew lending money was one of those things, but I had no idea Willa had gone to him.

“Yeah.” She was quiet again for a few seconds. “Tell me, how are you? Really?”

I started to say fine, brush it off, hold everything tight to my chest like I always had before. But I didn’t want to be that Stephanie anymore, and Willa wouldn’t let me anyway. She hadn’t let me retreat, not since we started this friendship, and I was glad of it. “I’m scared,” I said. “Scared that this won’t last, that it’ll all go away.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m happy, Willa, happier than I’ve been in so damn long. What if I lose him? What if he gets tired of dealing with all my crap?” I took a shuddering breath. “What if he sees how broken I am and gives up on me?”

There, I’d said it. My biggest fear. I believed Tomas cared for me, that I could trust him with every part of me, but I was broken and I always would be. What I went through with Ryan wouldn’t just go away, not completely. How could I expect Tomas to deal with that—my brokenness, the nightmares, the insecurities, the fear—when it reared its ugly head? Because it would.

I came with baggage.

“You deserve happiness, Steph, so much. You deserve every good thing. I’ve seen the way Tomas looks at you, the way he’s been looking at you for the last year. I can’t believe that he’ll ever give up on you. He loves you. You don’t give up on the people you love.”

He loved me? Did he? Could he?

“Look, Jude doesn’t know much about Tomas’s family, but he did say that his father was the kind of man who demanded obedience from his family,” Willa said.

My stomach flipped. “And if they disobeyed?”

“Jude saw…bruises. Tomas tried to hide them, but they all saw. His mother, too. People knew he hit her, but she would always cover for him. She—”

“I…I need to go.” I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.

“Steph—”

“Thank you for sharing that with me. Tomas doesn’t talk much about himself. That was…it was helpful.”

“Stephanie—”

“I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up, finding it suddenly hard to breathe.

A repetitive sound like little bells came from the bottom drawer of Tomas’s desk—a familiar sound, the one I’d chosen on my old phone for text messages. I opened the drawer and sure enough, there it was. With a trembling hand, I picked it up and looked down at the messages.

I scrolled through them, hundreds that Ryan had sent me since Tomas took my phone. Some pleading, begging me to come back. My lack of response saw them getting more and more vicious, violent.