“Mom?” I screamed.
It was her. The message was from earlier tonight. She came back.
“Mom!” I cried out again.
And a creak split the floor to my left, and I stopped, my face scrunching up and my eyes squeezing shut as the nightmare loomed even though I was no longer a
sleep.
But I refused to cry. I locked my jaw, fisted my hands, and turned toward him.
“Damon,” I said to my ghost who now had a name. “Perks of being rich, huh? You can make bail in record time.”
I shook my head.
He was going to get off. Nothing was going to happen to him. Guys like him never paid.
“Your friends were arrested, too, I hear,” I said. “The town is in chaos tonight.”
I didn’t hear him move, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. Reaching behind me, I grabbed a gold figurine on the table, with a nice, pointy part on it.
“And you’re here.” I listened carefully for footsteps. “Why are you here?”
He didn’t say a word, and for a moment it felt like the very first time he broke in and terrified me. This time, though, I wouldn’t be waking up safe. He’d had his fun, and now he was here to have more.
“You want to shut me up?” I pressed. “Hurt me? Or do you want to see how much you already hurt me?”
Was he here to keep me quiet, or because he just couldn’t resist his sick, perverted kink? To survey the damage he’d done on the girl who had been ready to run away with him this morning. Dreaming of waking up in his arms, in a warm bed with a fire roaring in the cold mountains.
It meant nothing to him.
“The best I’ve ever felt in seven years were the nights with you,” I told him, tears springing up. “So just soak it up, because you win. I fucking fell for it. I want to eat my goddamn heart, because it wouldn’t hurt as much as what you did to it this morning. I hate you.”
My legs started to buckle underneath me as I cried, and my head started to swim.
“I hate you,” I said, a sob thick in my throat, “and I’ll hate you forever, so do what you’re going to do, because I’m dead. I’m dead already.”
I would never trust another man again. I’d have to leave my school and my home to escape the gossip.
I was the one paying for his lie, not him, but so help me God, I would drag him down with me. I would make sure he remembered me and know how enormously he failed at being the worst thing to ever happen to me, because he wasn’t that important. He was nothing.
I didn’t love him. I didn’t even understand him.
“My father hates me. My sister hates me,” I said. “My mom can’t stand on her own. You made me think I wasn’t alone. Why would you do that?”
The floor creaked again, closer this time, and I shot out my hand to get ready, but I stumbled, my head spinning, and I fell to the floor.
What was going on?
I swayed my hand on the floor, unable to steady myself.
“What’s… what’s wrong with me?”
“You drank the water,” he finally spoke.
The water. The water? And then I remembered the glass my mother left me in my bedroom.
And my door was opened when she had closed it. He’d come in when I was asleep. He’d put something in the water?