Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 299(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 299(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
“I don’t know what to say,” I confess, though I force another smile so I look like I’m speechless from his flattery. “Only that I hope you keep thinking about me enough to call tomorrow.”
He smiles back. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
“I think that’s our car,” I say when I see a red Mazda coming toward us. “I hope to hear from you.” Elsie keeps up the act of being super drunk until we’re in the car and are at least a block away.
“The fuck?” She sits up, shaking her head back and forth. “He saw your Uber turn on this street and went looking?”
I inhale, quickly putting my psychologist hat on so I can disassociate from this situation. Could this be seen as a grand romantic gesture of sorts? He knew I was going to a club nearby—because I did say that—and he put two and two together when he saw the car take me down Kinzie Street? I don’t give off nightclub-loud-music-dance-with-glowsticks vibes, so Unscripted makes sense.
What had he been doing for the last two hours? Had he actually been inside, watching me talk and laugh with my friends? Shit, my friends. Zara and Kat left before us. I reach into my purse for my phone so I can check their locations. I see a bunch of texts and two missed calls from Mason. Suddenly, I’m a little shaky again as I call him back.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“Yeah. I think so,” I tell him and take a steadying breath. “Startled, that’s all.”
“What happened? Don’t leave anything out.”
“Um, I walked outside with a friend to get our Uber and he was just there. Across the street.”
“By himself?”
“Yeah. He said he saw the Uber turn onto Kinzie and…I don’t know…went up and down looking inside for me.”
“Did you see him inside?”
“No,” I say. “But I wasn’t really looking or paying attention.”
“Where are you now?”
“In another Uber. Headed to my friend’s house.”
Mason pauses for a second. “Don’t go home. I’m going to text you an address and have the driver drop you off there. Are you still on Kinzie?”
“Yeah. We’re headed toward Nobel Square.”
“Share your location with me.”
I nod, forgetting he can’t see me and put the call on speaker while I give him access to my location. A minute ticks by before he texts me an address.
“Go here,” he says and I have the driver pull over, ending our current trip so we can go to a new destination.
“Where are we going?” Elsie asks and I shrug, letting her know I have no freaking clue as I tap the address so I can pull it up on the GPS. It’s an apartment nearby, looking like nothing out of the ordinary.
“Take me off speaker,” Mason says and I do, bringing the phone to my ear. “Is your volume down?”
I click it a few times. “It is now. Where are we going?”
“A safe house.”
Chapter
Sixteen
MIRA
“Thanks,” I tell the Uber driver and get out, looking up and down the street. I don’t see any other cars but now I’m all freaked out and not convinced Enzo doesn’t have little spies all over the place and all he has to do is say the word and someone will be following me.
While that might be true for someone like his father or maybe even one of his cousins, I don’t think it would be true for him. He doesn’t seem like high-ranking material…which also can mean he has less to lose.
“This place looks sketch,” Elsie loops her arm through mine as we walk up the uneven, cracked sidewalk. I can hear a train in the distance and music thumps from one of the apartments on the third floor. The balcony is open and a few guys leans against the railing, smoking. I punch in the code Mason gave me and close the entryway door behind us as soon as we’re in.
I lived in an apartment similar to this when I first moved to Chicago after college. I was engaged to Cory at the time and he chastised me for having an apartment because he had always “owned a home”, though his owning a home was actually him living rent-free with mommy and daddy. I rented a little apartment not too different from that first one right after I filed for divorce, back when I decided to sell the house we had bought together—with money I had made—but Cory kept the proceeds of the sale tied up in court for nearly two years.
I blink and get hit with the memory of walking into the little foyer and feeling a sense of peace wash over me. Yeah, it was run down and always smelled like stale coffee and urine, but it was my space and Cory hadn’t touched, though he still haunted me every chance he got. It was raining on this particular day, a full month or so after I had filed and left.