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He knew.
I wasn’t ready for him to see me as a broken person. I wasn’t ready for him to treat me like a porcelain figurine. I wasn’t freakin’ ready to lose him!
And I knew I would.
Sure, he would be sympathetic. He now realized who I was to him. How he knew me.
I knew before my sister moved a muscle that he wouldn’t look at me the same anymore. That’d been why I’d been avoiding him, after all.
But this? This was definitely going to change everything.
He would think, oh, that’s sad. Then he’d go about protecting me, smothering me like every other person in my life who knew about the almost-rape and assault that I’d endured at the hands of a madman.
He wouldn’t be able to see past it.
“What’s wrong, doll?” Mavis whispered.
I swallowed hard and twisted the paper around in her hands and showed her the article, feeling a sinking sensation in my heart.
“Oh, shit,” she rasped after scanning the headline.
Vlad, who was in her arms eating, shrieked with protest when neither one of us moved to feed him the rest of his breakfast.
“Sorry, bud,” she whispered, sounding hoarse.
I felt her pain.
I was fucked.
“He’s going to come after you,” she breathed.
I felt fear course through me again at her concurring with my previous thoughts.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“No.” She sounded fucking shattered. “We just got over him.”
Him being Jackson Norris, a thirty-four-year-old investment banker that should’ve been an upstanding pillar of society.
On the outside, he was. On the inside, he was a monster bigger than anyone I’d ever experienced in my whole life.
Once the depth of his depravity—his satisfaction and enthusiasm in murdering women that turned him down for dates—came to light in that courtroom, it was horrifying.
He’d murdered over a dozen women in a year and a half. All of the women, according to him, had turned him down for a date. Every single one of them but me had met the same fate.
Every one of them but me.
But I’d been able to fight back. And Taos had been close enough to save the day.
Though he didn’t know just how many ways in which he’d saved me.
“You’re going to have to tell him,” she whispered, echoing my thoughts.
I cleared my throat, wanting to make sure it came out sounding sturdy.
It wouldn’t do to have her thinking I was a mess.
Even though I was.
“I have a feeling he already knows.” I sounded remarkably unaffected.
Her eyes sharpened. “You’re okay with this?”
The doorbell rang again. Again, we both ignored it.
I wasn’t. How could I be?
“No,” I admitted. “I’m fucking pissed as hell. I mean, who does this woman that wrote this article think she is? Where did she even get her sources?” I paused. “Does it mention it in there?”
She knew what ‘it’ was without me even having to explain.
“No,” she admitted. “She’s either very new to the city and the area, or she’s trying to at least save you a little bit of face.”
My guess was she didn’t know. That was too juicy of a subject to forget to mention like that.
“Or she’s planning to put that particular information into another article,” I grumbled.
“Or that,” she agreed. “I wish that I had a different answer for you. But, since your man is particularly unobservant, or wishes not to think about why he knows you so well as he does, doesn’t mean the rest of the city is that unobservant.” She winced. “But I might’ve blown that little top off when I talked to him at the gym. I mentioned Grandma.”
I shook my head. “I changed my name back, Mavis. My last name now matches yours. There’s no way he never made that connection. I just… we never talked about it. So I never thought it needed to be brought up. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know.”
After the very publicized trial, I’d gone out of my way to distance myself from the ‘Pope’ name. To the point where I’d legally dropped “Pope” and used my middle name as my last name. It was too freakin’ noticed when we were young. Oh, you’re a Pope? Please, come to the front of the line.
Oh, you’re a Pope? Please, take the beating heart right out of my chest. I don’t think I need it anymore.
Honest to God, it’d been a breath of fresh air for everyone to talk to me, Fran, instead of Francine Pope, the girl that owned half the freakin’ world.
The girl who, with her sister, had lost her parents at a young age, and had practically been raised by her grandmother who fucking hated her guts.
My grandmother was still living and breathing. Still just as much of an asshole as she’d always been.
Still pissed that I would drop the name that she’d worked so hard to build.
What she didn’t know was that it was hard to use that name when you were young. People expected things out of you that you didn’t want to give. And if you didn’t meet their standards? They spread the word that a Pope had failed.
