Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
I stumbled to a stop when the wall of windows came into view.
A fuel tanker was being moved away, and there was an empty spot where our chartered jet had sat last night.
Disbelief burned through my system. That asshole had…left me.
Logan was right. He was a pussy.
My teeth gritted. A crush of despair and a slur of insolence.
Hatred and disgust.
What was I going to do? I had sixty dollars, a phone charger, and a tube of lipstick in my clutch.
Jarek saw to it that I had no funds at my disposal. I was given an allowance to shop and play the pretty part of a woman in my position.
Beyond that, I was at his mercy.
Which meant I would have to call my father, swallow what little pride I had left, and make up some vapid story about how I’d gotten to this ski destination and become stranded.
Ask him for a way to get home.
So, so long ago I’d lost any semblance of what home might mean.
Because there was no sanctuary there. No respite. No comfort.
Swallowing it down, I moved for the ticket counter so I could inquire if there were any available flights, my hand shaking as I fumbled into my clutch to get my phone.
Only it rang the second I pulled it out.
My stomach soured when I saw his name on the screen. A burst of spite filled me to full.
“Jarek.” I wished his name didn’t tremble when I said it.
“You answered.” His voice was a sneer.
Barely controlled hatred whipped through my chest like a windstorm. I tried to keep it subdued. To act like the dutiful wife I was supposed to be.
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
He scoffed. “I thought you might be busy.”
Anger broke through a fissure. One that’d been forming for years. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t play coy, Aster. Don’t act like last night didn’t play out exactly how you intended it.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Or was it planned all along?” he pressed. “Make me look like a fool? Cheat me?”
Ire escaped my lungs, scraping up my throat in a clap of disbelief, resentment thick in the hiss of the words. “You think I set that up?”
I heard the clanking of ice in a glass. It wasn’t even eight, and I knew he was drunk. “Maybe not, but I know you wanted it. Did you enjoy fucking him? You are just a whore, after all, aren’t you?”
Pain lanced through my spirit, wrapped in a bow of malevolence. The horror he’d wielded. The sorrow he’d inflicted. And I’d had no choice but to go along with it.
Moisture burned like poison at the backs of my eyes.
Tears that welled from the loss.
The injustice.
The loneliness.
“You are the one who all but sold me.”
He laughed a disgusting sound. One that crawled over me like chills of revulsion. “You’re mine to sell, no?”
Bile ran the length of my throat, and I finally cracked. “Fuck you.”
Before I let him get in another word, I ended the call, and I clutched the phone in my hand like smashing it could grind the last seven years into dust. Short clips of air jutted my shoulders, and waves of dizziness spun my head.
What had I done?
I was supposed to go crawling back to Jarek to smooth things out for Logan, and I’d likely made it worse.
Stifling the meltdown, I forced myself to look up at the monitors, at the departing flights for the day, because I had to get it together.
They bleared over, the times and destinations morphing into lines of nothingness.
My phone buzzed, and I managed to read the text through the blur. One from my father.
Papa: Where are you? I was informed you did not arrive home on Jarek’s plane this morning.
I should make something up. Ask him to get me home. Crawl back on my hands and knees to Jarek and bargain my soul.
But I was frozen.
Unable to do it.
There had to be a better way.
There had to be.
I swallowed down the fear. Everything that had bound me my entire life.
What had kept me small and broken.
What had shaped me into a person I didn’t want to recognize.
What had chained me to a life I hated.
I let my fingers tap out a response. One I knew was a gauntlet. One that made Logan’s recklessness of last night look like child’s play.
Me: It seems your underboss has lost me in a bet.
Then I turned and ran out of the airport.
FIVE
ASTER
It was funny when you crossed a line in the sand and there was no turning back. When every excuse, rationalization, and justification of why you couldn’t twined together to form a knot of why you should.
Of why you had to.
Why you had to take a chance because you could no longer exist in the nothingness.
It didn’t mean it wasn’t the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.