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Thinking back to the girl I’d been when I first met him—she never stood a chance. It was like her job was to fall for Kash. It was written in the stars. It was inevitable. But all the shit that came afterward hadn’t been included in the fine print. She had no clue that choosing her father over her mother, choosing to fall in love with Kashton Colello, would eventually make her lose the one person who’d been there all her life.
Brain, shut off.
That was my own checkout.
When I started thinking thoughts like that, I automatically shut down. It was a door closing, and on the other side was a mess of catastrophe, hysteria, panic, hatred, loathing, and just so many emotions.
The girl (see, still talking in third person here) needed to go into zombie mode. So that’s what I did.
It was at the same time that the person chosen to check on me stepped next to me, and I turned even before they spoke another word. It was Matt. His face was closed off, but there was a distant hint of concern in his eyes. He had a glass of bourbon in hand, but to be honest, he rarely went without it lately, and he took one look at me, sighed, put his free hand in his suit pants pocket, and then turned to look out the window with me.
He murmured, right before taking a sip, “I don’t blame you one bit.”
I was hiding.
He knew it.
I now knew he knew it, and just like that, without another word spoken, we both looked out the window. I had no clue where we were. That was another given these days. I rarely knew what we were doing, where we were going. I just went. I showed up. I stood around. I sat around. I rarely spoke, and then eventually Kash would come get me, or he’d send someone for me, and then we’d go home and we’d repeat it the next day.
Today I asked, “Where are we?”
I felt Matt’s perusal more than I heard his silence before he responded, quietly, “We’re at an event at your school. Dad donated that seventy million.”
That would explain why I saw one of my classmates earlier. And why I was in a dress that itched.
“Oh. Okay.”
That was it. That was all I had in me.
So, back to the window.
It was a good window.
I just never saw the window.
THREE
Kash
“She’s not doing good.”
I grunted at Peter’s statement, turning to him. “No shit.”
We were standing in a banquet room, surrounded by Bailey’s professors and Hawking higher-ups, and both of us were watching our girl standing at the window. Matt was with her now. Neither spoke a word, but I was glad he was there. Her brother had tuned in to how to be with her, because if you pushed her, Bailey would bolt. She couldn’t handle much, and I had actually sat and watched her turn herself off too many times to count.
“I’m glad you guys moved into the house.”
I hated it. “It’s good for Bailey to be around you guys right now.”
“That, and your apartment wasn’t safe.”
She was thinner since Chrissy’s death. Bailey always looked beautiful to me, always would, but there was a sadness that emanated from her. She looked lost at the same time. I watched as she began rubbing her chest, her finger scratching her dress, and I was feeling the same itch. Maybe it was because of my background, knowing why my parents had been murdered, who had had them murdered, and the fact he was still out there, butI hated living in a house like Peter’s. It was a mansion, but we were put up in our own section.
We were supposed to have privacy.
That wasn’t the truth.
Seraphina. Cyclone. Even Matt. Marie. Theresa. They were all stopping by, all checking on Bailey, and I couldn’t blame them. I’d have done the same if I wasn’t the one holding her in my arms. But I hated that building. Give me an apartment building with a clear escape route next to me, or my own place like the villa, and I was happy. I’d been staying at the villa almost since I first moved in with the Francis family.
