AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My brain tries to remember. I was homesick. The girls were mean. They were teasing me. I called my parents.
“Poor Payton. At a friend’s house and oh, so sad. Never happy no matter how many people you bend to your will. It’s always about you. Always about Payton. You just had to beg them to pick you up and take you home,” she snarls out. “They died going to get you. They died trying to make you happy.” Her nostrils flare with fury.
“I’m so sorry, Erin, but I was a kid—”
A hand slaps against my face. The skin on my cheek burning hot.
“Shut up, you little brat! Everything. You took everything from me.” She swipes away an angry tear. “I had a life before you. I was going to go to college. I was going to make something of myself, but then I was forced to raise you. I was forced to take you in.”
“You didn’t have to. You could have—”
“What? Put you in foster care?” She scoffs. “Then I wouldn’t have gotten my parents’ money . . . Because obviously that was in their damn will.”
“What money? Our parents didn’t leave us money.”
“Of course, they did, you little idiot. But you were a minor. You didn’t know anything I had to do for you.” She stalks forward. I edge back as far as I can with the binds. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. But by then, I was already saddled up with you.”
“Again, why didn’t you get rid of me?”
“I was going to. But then I saw how men looked at you.” She shrugged. “I thought I could use it for my benefit. Until you took him, too.”
I shiver at her words. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I was going to sell you.” She spells it out for me, her tone condescending, betraying how dumb she thinks I am. “Tony was going to help me . . . We would have gotten a pretty penny for you, but you had to mess that up, too.”
Tony. Her ex.
Her horribly abusive ex.
The music gets louder, and suddenly, I’m back there.
On the couch.
His warm breath on my cheek.
His hand on my lap.
The music playing on the stereo in the room.
“He was going to hurt me,” I whisper, remembering everything now. It slams into me, harder than the car did. “You saved me.”
“Saved you?” Erin’s dry laughter pierces the air. “I didn’t do it to save you. I did it because he was mine, and you couldn’t have him.”
The memory of that day plays in my mind.
My sister was screaming . . .
They fought.
Then she pushed him.
He fell down the stairs.
An accident.
She was protecting me. It was the thing I clung to in my worst moments—how she’d been there when I needed her most. It was why I never left her. It was why I kept the loyalty even when she treated me like dirt.
I thought she saved me.
