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I was dizzy. The room was spinning. I closed my eyes to make it stop, but I still felt off-balance. My breathing had quickened, and it was becoming difficult to take a breath.
Arms wrapped around me, and I didn’t fight them. I needed to feel some sort of balance. I was starting to feel frantic. I began to suffocate. I couldn’t get oxygen. I started kicking and clawing to pull air into my lungs.
Blaise’s voice was close, and I felt his chest against me. His arms tightened around me, and I opened my eyes to see he had placed me in his lap. I focused on his face. He was talking to me. His voice was deep, although I couldn’t understand him. The panic inside me was still drawing me under.
He pressed his lips near my ear and began to talk softly. “I’m so sorry.”
The pain in his voice was what pulled me back.
I gasped loudly, oxygen filling my lungs, and grabbed his shirt in my fists, holding on for security.
“I’m so fucking sorry. I never wanted you to hear that,” he whispered, kissing the side of my head.
I closed my eyes as the frantic feeling began to fade to exhaustion. I dropped my head to his shoulder and held on to him.
“She needed to know,” Huck said.
“Get the fuck out of my sight.” Blaise’s voice was quiet, but the violence in his tone surprised me.
I buried my face in his chest, not wanting to look at him. Not wanting to face anyone.
I had trusted my dad. I had been his Maddy girl. I knew things had changed in him the last couple of years, and he was more distant, but I thought it was the stress of being unable to keep a job. I had feared he was depressed and needed help we couldn’t afford. Never would I have guessed this.
The lump in my throat felt as if it was going to gag me.
“I tried so damn hard to stay away from you, but I couldn’t. I knew having you meant, one day, I’d have to tell you this, and it was the last fucking thing I ever wanted to do,” Blaise said, brushing his lips over my forehead now.
I blinked, and a tear rolled down my face. Squeezing my eyes closed, I felt several tears follow it.
Was there a pain worse than this? If I could have just gone on believing they had died in a car accident, would it have been better, easier?
Blaise hadn’t wanted to kill them. That had never been his plan. But my dad … no, he wasn’t my dad. I didn’t have a dad. He was Luke. He had wanted to sell me. My stomach rolled, and I felt a cold sweat break out on my face.
If Blaise had never found me, if he’d never checked in on me, I’d … I’d be in some foreign country, being used by men for sex. Or maybe dead by now, like Huck had said.
My stomach rolled again at the thought, and I sat up in an attempt to get off Blaise’s lap. He held me, and I shook my head. I was going to be sick. I had to move away.
“Easy,” Blaise said.
I opened my mouth to tell him to let me go when the first heave hit me, and I tried not to get it on him. He moved me then, but didn’t let go of me.
“Go get her a cold towel,” he said as another wave hit me, and I threw up again.
He was holding my hair back as another came. My legs were weak, but Blaise was holding me up.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered once it stopped.
Huck was there, holding out a cloth to Blaise. He sat me back on his lap, then cleaned my face. I let him do it. I needed him to because never in my life had I needed to know someone loved me more than in this moment. I’d only had one family, and they had betrayed me in a way so horrible that I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover from it.
“How could they?” I choked out.
“Heroine. It destroys people,” Blaise said. “That wasn’t the man who had raised you. Try to think of it that way. The drug took over his brain. Everything that had made Luke the man you called your father was wiped from him. The drug took all that.”
Would I ever be able to accept that? Believe that Luke was gone? That the decision to sell me hadn’t been him anymore? I didn’t think I could. He’d had a choice. I couldn’t truly believe that drug addiction could make you that cold toward your child. It didn’t seem possible.
I recalled that evening. Replaying every moment in my mind. “I came back to the apartment two hours later than usual. Their mom had been forced to work overtime. It had been so quiet. I went to the fridge to find something to make us for dinner.”
