AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mine? Or his?
“What happened to us?” I asked, my voice a croak.
“You don’t remember?”
I shook my head, making my brain throb in my skull. I winced and pressed my hand to my head.
“I have medicine for you.” From his coat pocket, he pulled two amber bottles. “Something for the pain and an antibiotic. And the doctor said you should drink more water. That might help with the headache.”
He left and came back into the room with a glass of water, crossing from the doorway to the side of the unfamiliar bed. Despite his blood-stained shirt and grim face—despite my injury, despite not remembering what happened—I wanted him to come into the bed. To wrap those arms around me and hold me. Comfort me.
Tell me all the lies he’d been telling me all along.
But that was a luxury I could no longer afford. I was in danger; my whole body knew it.
And the danger was him.
“What happened to my arm?”
“A bullet grazed you.”
“Grazed? It feels like it hit me.”
“You have fifty stitches.” He shook out the pills and I held out my hand, imagining the touch of his fingers against my palm as he set the pills against my skin. That small scrap of warmth. Of contact. Wanting it. Craving it. But instead of touching me, he set the pills down on the dark wooden table beside the bed, cluttered with reading glasses and novels that weren’t mine.
Right. See, Poppy? He’s making it clear.
With trembling hands, I picked up the pills, set them on my tongue, and grabbed the glass of water. The glass was really heavy, and I spilled icy water down my neck and chest like a child. But he didn’t help. He stood there and watched me fumble.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
“The taste of your come,” I snapped, surprising myself. I even looked him in the eye when I said it. Go ahead, I thought. Pretend nothing happened. Pretend you never touched me. But I won’t play that game.
He glanced away, out the window where the thick dark night pressed against the glass. “What else?”
“The way you held my head when you fucked—”
“Poppy!” He snapped and Lord, wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that something? This man rattled. This man showing me something he didn’t want me to see.
I was still terrified, but I smiled at him, feeling not at all myself, and I liked it. My head hurt, my mouth tasted of cotton, and my shoulder screamed with every breath.
But I wasn’t going to be this man’s victim anymore.
“I don’t remember getting shot,” I said. “Or getting stitches.”
“Probably for the best.”
“What day is it?” I asked.
“It’s night.”
“What night is it?”
His eyes were dark in his head and his face was drawn. Whatever had happened, he hadn’t slept. “It’s been twenty-four hours.”
I gaped at him. “A full day?”
“What do you remember?” He said it slowly, biting off the edge of each word.
“I remember the fire. Going back to my house. You were worried about things happening that you didn’t know about.”
“You remember being in the senator’s office in your house?”
“Yeah.” The gaps in my memory were closing. The events of the night were spooling together, and a trembling kind of alarm filled me. I shifted to the other side of the bed away from where he stood, putting some distance between us. If he noticed, he didn’t show me. “I do.”
I’d been looking through the files in the banker’s box the lawyer had given me, but something made me keep my mouth shut about that. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t, but I kept it to myself. “Theo came in and . . . did he drug me?”
“Yeah.”
“You were there.” Oh Fuck. He’d been standing in the hallway of my house with a gun in his hand. I put my legs over the edge of the bed and got to my feet. I wasn’t steady, but I was standing. “You killed the senator. You . . . shot him. That’s what Theo said.”
My head was light, and my body was heavy, and I couldn’t run. I knew that. I was wearing a man’s black dress shirt and nothing else. One sleeve had been torn off to accommodate my arm. The other hung past my hand and the hem went past my knees. It was Ronan’s. The black shirt he’d been wearing in that hallway.
“You won’t get far,” he said, reading my mind. “If you try to run.”
“You shot the senator. Tell me the truth.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because it was my job.”
“What kind of job is that?”
“Poppy, that’s not important.”
“You don’t get to decide that! You don’t get to decide any of this anymore.”
“It was business.”
“Whose business?”
The answer boomed in his silence. If we didn’t say the name, it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be real. But I was done pretending my world wasn’t wrong.
