“Hey,” she said as she stepped inside, wasting no time whatsoever in shrugging off her raincoat and draping it over the back of a seat opposite. I got to my feet to help her, but she ignored my advances of manners, pulling out a purse from her handbag and pointing up at the counter. “Fancy a coffee? Same as you used to drink?”
I didn’t let her take the lead on that front, stepping right out in front of her and gesturing her to sit. “I’ll get them. What works for you?”
She wanted the same drink she’d enjoyed all those years gone by. A morning mug of tea with just a tiny splash of milk and two heaped sugars. I couldn’t hold back the smile of the memory as I ordered it from the smiling barista.
Amelia was twiddling her fingers when I arrived back at our table with the drinks in hand. I couldn’t help but notice the sparkle of her engagement ring, tucked in tight to the simple gold band above it.
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Seven years,” she replied with slightly reddening cheeks. “It took me a long time… to move on… from you.”
I nodded. “Seemingly not as long as it took me.”
Her eyes dropped to her fingernails. “I’m sorry, Bran. I wanted our future as much as you did. I was just scared.”
“Scared of being taken out and buried. I get it.” And I did get it. I really fucking got it.
But she shook her head. “Scared that you would be. That’s what they told me. They told me they wouldn’t be able to leave you as part of the family name without the right connections to hold up the reputation. Told me you’d be following the route laid out for you, or there’d be an accident taking you out of it.” She paused. “As well as everyone else caught up with it, including my family back home.”
My jaw tightened. “They told you they’d take me out, did they? Who? My fucking father?”
She shook her head. “Drake. He said it was your father as well as him, but I doubt it. Not after I saw him that night.”
She stirred her heaped sugars into her tea and I let her take a breath before pushing.
“That night?”
“The night he came after me,” she said. “I knew he was coming, but didn’t know for what reasons, not really. I had people ready. Just a couple of people I knew. Watching. Ready to call in emergency support if I needed it, but it never came to that.”
“Never came to that?” I pushed again, and her lip did a little tremble.
“No,” she said. “Not with Drake turning up on the riverside before your dad even saw me alive. It never came to anything beyond that.”
And I knew what she meant. My heart shrivelled in pain at the memory of my father coming to his death in that river fall.
The accidental river fall that destroyed fucking everything for so fucking many of us.
Amelia George reached out a hand across the table and I flinched, I actually flinched. Only she wasn’t reaching to take mine, not in the way I thought she meant it.
Instead she took my palm and pressed a little memory card in tight.
“You can see it for yourself,” she said.Chapter Twenty-FourPaigeRebecca didn’t get any better overnight. She got worse. She was trembling in a sweat as the morning picked up outside, groaning with pain every time the mattress shifted under her.
“He fucked me too hard,” she managed to say with a grimace. “He put his fist in me. Hard. In my ass. And I couldn’t take it, not like that. I couldn’t take it.”
My stomach churned for her. I couldn’t imagine the pain.
I tried to get to speak to Mr Sinister but the security guard who delivered our breakfast said he was busy. I said we needed medical attention or at least some kind of pain management, but nothing came our way.
“I can’t do this again,” Rebecca said after managing two mouthfuls of cereals. “I can’t take anything again, my whole body is screaming.”
It looked like it too. Her eyes were dark with circles underneath, her bottom lip swollen. Her skin was ragged and bruised to extreme, her arms clenched over her belly.
“We’ll get out of here,” I assured her, though I didn’t know how. I only hoped Brandon’s brother had been talking about soon. Real damn soon.
We lay in silence both me and Rebecca, eyes on the ceiling as she struggled with the pain. I’d have given anything to take some of it from her.
“He’ll be after you, too,” she told me as the sun reached a midday high. “Believe me, he’ll be after you too, and they won’t stop him. Not like sir did. Sir knew how much we could take. These cunts here don’t give a shit.”