AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nova had convinced me her brother cared about me, and I’d been so sure that she was right.
Instead, he’d walked out that door. Taking what was left of my heart.
Every man in my life who was supposed to love and protect me had done nothing but let me down again and again. Garret was supposed to be different. He was going to be the one who broke the cycle, the one who healed my soul and made me believe in happily ever afters. Instead, he’d been like everyone else. Only this time, it was a hundred times worse. I’d given him my heart willingly, and he’d just thrown it away like it—like his baby and I—didn’t mean a damn to him.
My heart felt shattered, but I couldn’t allow that pain to hurt the baby, so I locked it down.
Angrily, I tossed the pillow in my hands across the room before curling up in the middle of the bed. I didn’t think it was possible to sleep, not with how much I’d been through emotionally, yet I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until the sun was filtering in through my curtains.
My eyes felt swollen as I lifted my lashes, and the nausea was definitely something I couldn’t ignore. Groaning, I rushed from my room to the bathroom. I was in there for at least an hour, so sick I couldn’t lift my head for the longest time. When I could finally stand, my entire body trembled from the effort, but I did it because there was no other choice. My baby needed me to be strong, and I would be.
Once I was cleaned up, I grabbed a few sports drinks from the fridge and went back to bed, deciding I would just rest and stay hydrated until I felt better. Then I would go to the pharmacy and get a pregnancy test.
After that…
I didn’t know what I was going to do after that, but I’d figure it out.
If nothing else, I still had Nova. As long as I had her, I knew everything would be okay.
Garret
The bartender placed the glass of Macallan in front of me, but when he started to take the bottle with him, I shot him a glare that had him placing the bottle on the bar top beside my glass. Giving him a nod, I picked up the tumbler and tossed back half the contents in one swallow.
I barely tasted the well-aged whisky as it slid down my throat. Around me, the bar was crowded and loud, but all I could see or hear was Lis as she’d urged me onto her couch and then dropped her bomb into my lap.
“My name is Calista Ramirez. My friends and family would call me Cali.”
Her words hadn’t made sense at first. I thought maybe she was playing a joke, considering all the shit I’d had to do to find Manuel Ramirez over the last week, only to come up with nothing. But then I’d looked at her, really looked at her, and I suddenly realized she wasn’t kidding.
Picture after picture flooded my mind from my teen years. Of beautiful Calista Ramirez as she did her makeup tutorial videos. When Ramirez had sent men to kill Nova, I’d been pissed and gone looking for someone to take out my frustration on. Mess with my sister? I’ll fuck with whomever your nearest and dearest was.
That was how I’d found Calista—Cali—on social media.
I’d been stoned out of my mind at the time, but not even my impaired brain could deny that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She could turn herself into any celebrity with just a little bit of makeup, but when her face was bare, that was when she was at her most enthralling.
It had been years since I’d thought about the girl I’d been borderline obsessed with. I’d lived for watching her videos. Every Instagram picture she shared, I saved to my phone so I could jack off to it later.
But that wasn’t the only thing I’d done.
And those memories were what hit me the instant I put it all together. Lis was Cali. The girl I’d tormented because her stepdad had tried to kill my baby sister. Like Nova, who hadn’t deserved to have a fucking drug lord target her because of how important she was to his biggest enemy, Cali hadn’t deserved the way I’d treated her. Both were innocent in the war between the Ramirez and Vitucci families.
That hadn’t stopped me from targeting Cali, though. Every chance I got, I would comment on her videos or slip into her DMs. I’d tell her terrible, sickening things—things that made my stomach churn even as I’d been typing them. How I hoped someone beat her like her stepdad had tried to beat Nova. How she didn’t deserve to live.
That I hoped she was raped and left for dead.
I gulped down the rest of the whisky in my glass before picking up the bottle to fill it to the brim. Expensive liquor sloshed over the side as I raised it to my mouth and gulped it down.
Lis had talked and talked, but I hadn’t heard a single word she’d said after her confession of who she was. I didn’t know how she’d gone from being the spoiled, pampered stepdaughter of Ryan’s family’s enemy—making him my enemy too—to waiting tables in a strip club and living in that tiny-ass apartment.
The few things she’d told me her stepbrother had done to her rushed into my head as the worst words I’d ever said to her echoed in the back of my mind. When had Manuel done those terrible things to her? Had he done them because I’d given him the idea when I’d posted that comment on a video?
My glass was empty again, so I picked up the bottle and started chugging, trying to drown out the thoughts. But they refused to be shut down.
Because I fucking knew in my gut that I was responsible for what had happened. I’d put those words out into the universe, and they had become reality. I was the cause of the nightmares that haunted the woman I loved.
And she’d known that. She must have.
Lis had been so unreachable at first, and now I understood why. Yet she’d eventually let me in, given me a chance.
