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“But I know a few things about rich men and poor girls,” Wanda Mae continued as if Brittany hadn’t said a word. “There’s nothing new about it.”
“Haven’t you heard, Mama? I’m not all that poor any longer. If I was, you wouldn’t get all those checks.”
“This is one of the oldest, saddest, most run-of-the-mill stories around.” Her mother’s voice was upsettingly even. Not harsh. Not cruel. As if she was relaying a simple fact, nothing more. “Rich men like to play their games. They like to put a pretty girl on their arm and make a show out of it. They like to make sure everyone knows what a sacrifice they’re making, taking on a charity project like her, so young and so desperate. And then they make those girls pay for the privilege. They make them pay and pay and pay. You might end up with more money, but you better believe that man will take whatever’s left of your soul.”
Brittany opened her mouth to say “you don’t know him,”but stopped herself just in time, horrified.
As if she did? As if anyone did? He’d beeninside her bodyand she didn’t know him at all.
“Thank you, Mama,” she forced herself to say through lips gone stiff. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She ended the call as her mother launched into another part of her lecture, then tossed the phone on the bed.
But she couldn’t control the way she shook. The way her stomach flipped, end over end. Or the way her mother’s words spun around and around in her head. As if Wanda Mae knew exactly how precarious this all was. As if she’d seen what Cairo had done to Brittany in that castle. How he’d touched her and, worse, how he’d made her feel.
What was going on with her that she’d tried to defend Cairo to her own mother when she hadn’t defendedherselfin years?
“She’s a lonely, bitter woman,” Brittany told herself furiously, scowling at the mobile phone on the coverlet as if it was her mother’s face, flushed with her usual anger. “You shouldn’t listen to a word she says.”
But her words disappeared the moment she said them, as if sucked out of the plane’s windows and tossed off into the dark.
And her mother’s words seemed to echo there instead, like a curse.
Like something worse.
Like prophecy.
