Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 69772 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69772 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Anyone, and I do mean anyone, would’ve been overwhelmed.
And Atlas being there was the final straw.
He was treating me like I was his brother’s beloved girl, and not someone he’d thrown away years and years ago. He was talking about Quinn’s new place. How I would make it a home. How Quinn had built it with me in mind.
Needless to say, when he’d gone to the bathroom, I’d gotten dressed in my bloody clothes and walked out.
Which led me to now.
My purse was useless.
Why was it useless?
When Ande had brought it to me, after having stopped by to grab it along with my cell phone, I’d been happy to know that I wasn’t stranded.
Only, after a quick visit to an ATM to grab cash—because I knew I could hide longer with cash—I’d found out a few very hard truths.
One, I couldn’t go home because the house was now an official crime scene.
Two, not only had the police department seized all the accounts that my brother was a part of, but apparently mine, too.
So, no money meant no hotel.
Hence, why I was now parked in a Cracker Barrel parking lot, right next to a truck stop.
I’d already used the showers in the truck stop to wash away the blood from my ordeal earlier and had changed into the only set of clothes that were in my car.
Now, I was lying on the back seat, wondering what the hell I had done to deserve this kind of life.
Was I a bad person in my previous life?
Had I done something to someone, once, that had caused Karma to deliver a shitty existence to me over and over again?
When would enough be enough?
When would my dues be paid?
When would I wake up, and this crazy ass life be over?
I didn’t want to end my life.
I just wanted a new one.
I wanted one where I was married to a man who cherished me. Who always, always chose me over everyone else. I wanted two kids, a house with a white picket fence, and a dog.
I wanted a life that I would love.
Not the one I was given.
I rolled over and felt the tell-tale sign of blood as it started to seep out of me.
I’d luckily had pads in my car, because the moment I’d walked out of the hospital, the blood had gotten much heavier.
If it kept going, I’d need to change again.
But I couldn’t force myself to stand up.
I couldn’t think about why I would need to change soon.
I couldn’t think about what had happened to put me in the position I was in now.
I couldn’t think about anything or anyone.
All I could do was stare numbly as the cash price on the sign for fuel changed over and over again.
Something moved outside the door, and I looked up to see a familiar blond head move into my field of vision.
And something overtook me.
Something strange and all encompassing.
I got out of my back seat, threw the door open so hard that it knocked into the woman standing in front of it, and snarled.
“You are not here right now!” I insisted.
Elliette grinned. “Oh, but I am.”
“You are not,” I snapped, thinking about the gun I had in my back seat. “Leave.”
“I’m sorry, but this is a free world.” She smirked. “What happened? Get kicked out? Can’t go home? No money to buy a hotel room for the night?”
I gritted my teeth. “Seems like you know it all, don’t you?”
“I know that your accounts are all frozen,” she smiled. “They’ll be that way for a while until the investigation decides you are either guilty or innocent. I’m going with guilty, though. You don’t have a gang member running drugs out of your house and not know a single thing about what’s going on.”
So I buried my head in the sand.
Sue me.
It was easier to pretend that my brother was an upstanding citizen if I didn’t pay attention to anything he did.
Hell, half the time I didn’t even look at him so I wouldn’t see something that I wasn’t supposed to.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I did my best to ignore anything and everything that was going on.” I shrugged. “I am innocent.”
She snorted. “You’re not.”
I fisted my hands. “I am. But you’re not.”
She rolled her eyes. “And how is that?”
“You took a life tonight.”
Her brows rose. “I don’t remember hurting anyone besides you.”
“Exactly,” I snapped.
Her brows rose. “I’m afraid you’re not making sense. That concussion you have going on is doing things to your brain.”
“I was pregnant,” I told her bluntly. “You hurt me so badly that I suffered a miscarriage.”
Something in her eyes changed. An unhingedness that had me taking a step back.
“You what?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything, choosing to stay silent.
Maybe it wasn’t the best thing in the world to confront her like…
She ran at me like a linebacker.