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I shiver again before I march across the room and lock the door again.
Not that that stopped him before. I know damn well I locked this when I left work yesterday afternoon, and I also know the cleaners don’t forget to lock up when they’re done.
No. He doesn’t know. That wasn’t him rubbing it in my face. That was just Hades being, you know,Hades. Cocky, obnoxious, arrogant. A bully. A lunatic. A shameless manwhore.
Yeah? Well, you fucked him, sister.
Heat floods my face again as I force myself back to my desk chair.
He doesn’t know, and that’s the end of that. It has to be, or I’m just going to drown in this thing until I fall apart. I’ll just file it away in that lock-box in my head—the place I store and hide anything that trips me up, or pulls me away from my planned trajectory.
Which, obviously, isn’t healthy, as all four of the therapists I’ve seen since I was seventeen have told me, repeatedly. But it is what it is. It’s how I deal. How I keep breathing, both for me, and for Nora. I take all the things that drag me down or lie across the path in front of me, and shove them deep into the very back of a closet I can then forget about.
One day, of course, the closet will have to be cleaned out.
But not today.
That’s how I’ve managed to get where I am. And, not to toot my own horntoohard, but you don’t get to bewhere I am, at the age of just twenty-six, without some seriously unhealthy mental health habits. But, therapy will still exist later, once I’ve hit my stride and can finally take a breath. Once I’ve created an iron-clad life for Nora and myself I can fix the parts of myself that got broken along the way.
Until then, though, this train doesn’t stop. For anything.
Certainly not for Hades fucking Drakos. Or his mind games.
Or his God-like dick and tongue.
I flush deeply, shaking those thoughts from my head for the last time. Then I do what I always do to bury or hide away things I don’t want to deal with: I open my laptop.
And I work.
For Nora. For me. For the future. Because I willnotbe our mother, chained to a life that grinds her under its heel and to a man who controls her, hurts her, and takes away everything that makes her herself.
I’ve been running from that potential future since I was fourteen. And nothing, not even the God of Hell himself, is going to stop me now.
* * *
“Stop.”
I gasp, almost spilling my coffee. I spin toward the voice behind me.
“Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”
Fumi—my colleague who has the office next to mine, and who’s also myonlyreal friend in New York—makes a face as she leans against the door frame. It’s not uncommon for her to launch directly into the middle of a conversation, whether you’re in a scheduled meeting or in neighboring bathroom stalls.
But normally it doesn’t give me a heart attack like a jump scare moment in a horror movie.
I blame the cocky and gorgeous menace that broke into my office two days ago.
“Sorry,” Fumi winces, tucking a strand of jet-black hair behind her ear. “I just had something really important to ask you.”
I nod as sink into my office chair and gingerly take a sip of my steaming hot coffee.
“Of course. Come in.”
She steps into my office and drops into one of the two chairs across the desk from me, nodding slowly as she taps her fingertips together meditatively.
My brows knit. “Is this about the Chesterman case? I talked to their family counsel on Friday afternoon. He seemed to think they’d be amenable to a—”
“Nice try, but I’m not asking about work.”
