much pain, my body still healing. I slept mostly with Ari watching, but then as the second week rolled on, my energy came back. The bruises are fading. My head doesn’t pound anymore when I turn it too fast.
I’m okay.
Yes, there’s still some discoloration, but the swelling is gone, the splits in my skin and lips have fully healed, my bones don’t ache if I move.
And now I have too much energy. Cabin fever is setting in. My eyes moving a little too much over the instruments and photos, the cabinets and drawers.
There’s an entire story hidden here, and something inside me is still afraid to touch it, but something else wants to tear it all apart and learn what Ari has done to me.
I suppress the urge by focusing on other things first. The piano mostly. I haven’t played in so long, but the first few notes are a balm to my soul, and after playing through the first song, I choose another and another.
It doesn’t escape my attention that the music beneath the bench seat is all mine. Not copies, but what I used to own. I’d donated all of it when I moved in with Grant, so how Ari got ahold of it, I have no clue.
Yet, there it is, with all my handwritten notes.
It makes me wonder what else is hidden away.
Standing from the bench, my ears tingle at the sudden silence, caution hanging over me as I walk slowly to one of the photos on the wall. It’s my favorite, the shadow hovering over me. I’m always drawn back to it because it balances me in a way. Reminds me of all the fear I’ve faced and lived to tell about.
Back when I took the shot, that was the symbolism intended, that and what I see when I get stuck between sleep and being awake.
It emboldens me now, and I turn to stare at the built in bookshelves, my eyes scanning down to the cabinets that line the bottom.
Maybe one, I think. Nothing crazy. Just one.
It’s like creeping up on a skittish animal...or a wild boar. Anxiety wraps its fingers around my throat, and my hands start shaking. Settling myself on the floor in front of the cabinet farthest on the right, I blow out a breath, reach for the handle...then yank it open and flinch like something will shoot out at me.
Nothing happens, but you wouldn’t know that from the way my heart is knocking against my ribs.
Why am I so scared?
It pisses me off that Ari was right about this. I’m not who I used to be. Before Grant, I would have ripped everything apart by now. I wouldn’t be staring into a neatly organized cabinet terrified to take out the first box and see what’s inside.
So, fuck it.
Anger shoots my hand forward, and I grab the first box I see. It’s not big, about the size of the packaging for a phone. But it still takes me a second to work up the nerve to tear the lid off.
I freeze at the ticket stub that rests on top, a rock concert I went to when I was eighteen at a club not too far from here.
It was my first date with a guy named Tyler Dixon. I’d met him a few nights before at a bar I went to with another friend. I remember getting piss drunk at that concert. I was having a good time, and I thought Tyler was, too, but he said he was going to the bathroom and ditched me there.
“He was planning on taking you to a friend’s house after the concert.”
I scream and drop the stub. Shoving the box away as if that will hide the fact I’m snooping, I turn to find Ari leaning a shoulder against the wall.
My heart lurches at the sight of him. As usual his midnight black hair is a stylishly disheveled mess, his skin even more golden against the stark darkness of his clothes. He’s business casual today, a black button down shirt and dark slacks, but he still looks like he walked off the cover of some men’s fashion magazine.
And those eyes.
Fuck, his eyes.
They aren’t fair.
They see everything.
“How the hell do you do that?”
Amusement glimmers in his gaze. “Do what?”
“Move around without making a sound. I didn’t even hear the elevator.”
His cruel lips curl at the corners. “I never tell my secrets.”
My heart drops from my throat back into my chest where it belongs, and I reach for the