The Price of Inertia (The Seven Sins #4) - Lily Zante Page 0,114
dad ripped up my work.
She won’t ever understand. I can’t ever make her see. She brought it all back, those buried, painful memories I’ve always strived to push out of my life.
I stare at the flickering fire. It crackles as my hard work turns to ash. Something dies inside me.
It might not have been so bad if I’d only caught her reading, but to find her taking pictures. The sight of her snapping away, doing that, going behind my back, did something to me. It was sneaky, and I had finally come to trust her. Who was she taking pictures for? She never explained why and my anger stopped me from asking.
And worst of all, she talked about Lisa.
Lisa.
Lisa.
She dredged it all back up again, the unwanted past with all its grime.
I wasn’t prepared for her questions. Wasn’t prepared to hear that name again. Wasn’t prepared for Mari to make those types of accusations.
Chapter 46
MARI
I get the cab straight to Jamie’s place. I have nowhere else to go. I have no one else to turn to.
I haven’t warned him, or asked him, or prepared him and I turn up on his doorstep, feeling as if my whole world just caved in, because it has. I am truly bereft of hope and friendship. He stares at me in shock, and then his gaze goes to the cut on my forehead.
“What happened?” Concern creeps into his expression and he takes my arm, leading me inside. “Mari?” His tone is more stern now. “What the hell happened?”
The cut isn’t deep, because it’s stopped bleeding now, but it looks bad. I managed to get a look at it in the cab’s rear view mirror.
It’s then that I notice he’s dressed up, as if he’s going out for the evening. “I banged my head.” I press a tissue to it and am relieved that there’s only a small blotch of blood that comes off. “Can I stay the night, please? There’s no place else for me to go.” If I could have gone elsewhere, I would have.
“Sure you can. You can stay anytime you want.”
“But you look like you were on your way out.”
He ignores my questions and leads me over to the couch and sits down beside me, his face hardening as he surveys my wound again. “He did that?”
“What? No.” It doesn’t matter.” I’m not in the mood for talking about it. I don’t want to tell him what happened, even though he was right about Ward.
I’m not ready to deal with it myself. I need the night to process everything that happened today; everything Ward said and did. I’ve put a band aid over it for now, but the wound is still deep and sharp.
I’ve messed up again, spectacularly fallen flat on my face with a guy, again. I blindsided Ward when I poked around about Lisa. I touched a raw nerve and wandered into dangerous territory I should never had stumbled into. He was holding me, and I got scared. He had me pinned in place and I couldn’t shake him off.
“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this.”
“It’s okay.”
“You look like you were going somewhere. I would have called, but he smashed my phone.”
“Who?”
I don’t give him an answer, but he seems to know. Who else could it be? Jumping up, he puts a fist to his mouth as if to stop himself from smacking it through the wall. “Ward smashed your phone?” His voice drips with rage. I stare at my hands, then at my knees.
“What the fuck?” he growls. “Tell me what happened.”
I shake my head because I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s not fair for me to expect Jamie to take me in like this when he must have a million questions.
“Are you going to tell me what happened, Mari, or should I march over there and smash his face?” He grabs his keys and heads towards the door.
“No. Don’t!” The last thing I need is for him to go to Ward’s place and confront him. I look at my phone, pressing the buttons, willing it to start working again but it’s dead. “I’ll tell you if you come back here.”
“Stay put.” He returns seconds later with a wet flannel and a jug of water and begins to clean my wound. I wince as he wipes the dry blood away.
“I’m trying to be gentle,” he says, his voice softer.
“Thank you.”
He doesn’t say anything at first, then “How do you explain this?” he asks,