or twice.
“Not that it mattered. Things weren’t good. I knew I had to leave. I just didn’t know how or when to tell him. That and I had final exams and papers due. In the last few weeks, I didn’t fight with him about the hours he kept. I tried not to talk to him at all. I just kept my head down and started taking extra shifts at work. I needed to save for a new apartment deposit.”
“So conceivably, he could have believed you two were okay?”
“No, he couldn’t possibly…” She trailed off, lapsing into silence.
“Why not?” he prompted after a minute.
“Because I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore,” she said after a long pause.
“Oh.” Mason was almost sorry he asked.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Not about se—another guy,” she stumbled.
Mason reached out to take her hand. “Laila, he was your boyfriend. You lived with him. Your life went on after our night together. I understand.”
Moving on had been a natural step forward for her. He hated her being with another man. He hated the whole situation that led up to it, but he didn’t blame her. He wasn’t a hypocrite—it could have easily been him. If he hadn’t been so busy, he might have started seeing someone else too.
“Anyway,” she said. “That’s what set him off again.”
Mason froze. “Because you wouldn’t sleep with him?” he asked in a too-even voice.
“No!” Laila shook her head. “Not that. I meant I tried to call him out on not coming home the night before.”
She reached up to rub her temple. “I’m explaining this badly.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll talk until it makes sense.”
Laila made a little sound in the back of her throat. “The day before yesterday, I was writing my last term paper. I had finished all my other final exams and lab practicals. This paper is the very last thing I need for my associate degree in respiratory therapy. I stayed up all night finishing it. I was printing it on the office computer when I heard him come in. I didn’t want to talk to him, so I went to get ready for work instead of fighting it out then and there.”
“But you did later,” he guessed.
She nodded. “After I got home from work.”
“And?”
Laila put her hands up, her eyes focusing on nothing. “He exploded. I didn’t even see the slap coming. And weirdly enough, he seemed almost as shocked as I was.”
She raised a hand to her face as if she still couldn’t believe Joseph had struck her.
“I fell after he backhanded me,” she continued, her fingers tracing her swollen lip. “At first, I thought he was so angry because I said I was leaving.”
“But now you don’t think that was it?”
“No. Maybe.” She shrugged. “But he seemed more upset about the other thing—he kept insisting I was wrong about him not coming home that night. He kept arguing about it. He said I must have fallen asleep because he came home before one AM—that he slipped into the guest room so he wouldn’t disturb me and went jogging early that morning. That’s why I heard the door when I did. It was him coming back after a run.”
“All right,” he said slowly. “So, what’s he hiding? An affair?”
She shrugged. “That’s what I think. After all, he’s got a bedroom at the frat. His Alpha Omega brothers would never rat him out to me. Hell, they must get a kick out of it. They claim the Night Witches are ‘honored guests,’” she said, raiding her hands to make air quotes. “But secretly, they must love it that he hooks up with anyone he wants and gets away with it right under my nose.”
“That does make a kind of sense,” Mason murmured. But he wasn’t completely convinced.
Why would Dubey get violent about this on this occasion if it were something they’d argued about it before? Was it because Laila finally said she was leaving? But Dubey had to have seen that coming.
A few minutes later, Laila returned to bed, but Mason stayed up a little longer. Eventually, he crashed, too, deciding there wasn’t a great mystery to Joseph Dubey’s actions.
Some cowards didn’t need an excuse to abuse a woman. Laila trying to walk out on him would have been enough.
The question now was—what was Mason going to do about it?
Chapter Twenty-Five
After a nearly sleepless night, Laila woke and pulled jeans and a shirt out of the garbage bags of clothes she’d set on the closet shelves. She