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I snuggle up with my blanket, laying my head back on a cushion as I wrap the ice pack in a thin layer of paper towel before gently placing it between my lips. It’s awkward as fuck, and for the first time in a while, I’ve never been so happy not to have one of the guys hanging around. They’d completely understand my predicament, but they’d also want to see, and some things a woman just can’t share. For me, an ice pack shoved between my lady lips would be it.
The painkillers finally start to do their thing and I close my eyes, feeling the calm starting to spread through my mind. I zone out and allow my brain the silence it’s deserved all night and finally drift off into a peaceful sleep.
I don’t know how long I’m out for but when I roll over and the ice pack launches halfway up my vag, my eyes spring open and I quickly realize that my ass turned off the fireplace and now I’m freezing, my neck is aching from the cushion, and on top of that, my tank is so twisted that both my tits are hanging right out, one where my arm is supposed to be and the other protruding out the neck hole.
Just fucking great.
I sit up and cringe but having the ice pack on me for so long seems to have helped a little. Scooping up the little blanket, I wrap it around myself and make my way back up the stairs, more than ready to scoot down into my own bed and sleep until this time next week.
Carver will forgive me for not coming back while I’m sure King wouldn’t mind the company at all. Though, if the fucker starts breathing in my face, he’s out. I love my guys but I’m so down for a little peace and quiet.
I reach the top of the stairs and move toward my bedroom door, but a soft creak in the floor has my gaze shifting down the hallway. Cruz and Grayson’s bedroom doors are closed and as I can still see King hanging off my bed, I realize that it must be Carver.
His door is propped open a little further than I’d left it and guilt instantly sails through me. If he’s been up this whole time waiting for me to come back for him, I’m going to feel like a colossal bitch. Though, I also wouldn’t put it past him to have been the one to come downstairs and turn off the fire so that I would freeze and be forced back upstairs to his bed. He’s a dick like that.
Letting out a sigh, I tighten the blanket around me and make my way toward Carver’s room, more than ready to either apologize for keeping him waiting for so long or call him out on his standard douchebaggery techniques. My hand presses against his door and as I swing it open, the light from the hallway spreads through his room and I find Ida Carver standing over him, her hand raised high in a dramatic arc with a knife that sparkles against the intrusion of light.
My eyes bug out of my head and as her hand begins to lower, I scream. “CARVER!”
His eyes spring open and I start to run but I’m too far away, I’ll never make it in time, but Carver’s reflexes are like lightning bolts. He rolls out of the way and springs up to his knees just as his mother’s knife plunges deep into his mattress, right where his heart used to be.
I hear the familiar sound of the guys flying out of their beds and racing down the hallway and I come screeching to a stop, my eyes wide as I watch Carver, his chest rising and falling with rapid movement. He stares at his mother in shock, the betrayal tearing across his perfect features and making me want to strangle her for darkening his soul like that.
Ida sucks in a sharp gasp, realizing just how much trouble she’s in, and as the guys barrel into Carver’s room behind me, his hand flies out, wrapping around his mother’s on the hilt of the knife. “What did you do?” he spits, his eyes filled with the worst kind of venom.
She shakes her head, desperately trying to pull her hand out from under his grip, but he’s too strong, even in a foggy, sleep-deprived state. He yanks the knife out of the mattress and steps off his bed, forcing his mother back against the wall, leaving her nowhere to go and absolutely nowhere to run as we all watch on in horror.
The knife remains between them, the question of how she was released from her cell silent in the air around us.
“You put me in a cell to rot,” she sneers through a clenched jaw. “After everything that you’ve done to me. You allowed your trailer trash girlfriend to take your father’s life, you took my home, and then my children. How could you do that to me? I am your mother, I bore you in my womb, and you have done nothing but ruin me. I gave you life and in return, you disrespect mine, but I will see this through, Dante. You do not deserve the Carver name. You will never amount to anything and I will see to it that the Carver name returns to the great glory that it once was. I swear on your father’s grave. You have let me down for the last time.”
