I could almost pretend I was far away from it all.
“You should be okay out here,” the server said in her neat vest and bow tie. I loved bow ties. Honestly, I was made to be a catering server.
“Thank you so much!” I said, showing way too much enthusiasm for the kindness she’d shown me, but there’d been a real lack of kindness—big or small, in my life in the last year so I always got a little messy around it.
“It’s just where the servers smoke, nothing to get excited about,” she said with lots of side eye.
The server vanished through the open doorway, and I walked out into the grass, past the edge of the light thrown from the lantern fixture over the door. In the distance was the thick tree line that separated the Constantine land from my parent’s old house. When Zilla found out what Dad had done, she burned the house down. That’s when we knew the medication wasn’t enough. That’s when Belhaven happened. When everything changed. What was left of the house after the fire and the willow tree had been bulldozed, the pond filled, the land sold to the Constantine’s.
I could run around to the front of the house and get a key from the valet. Any key. Any car. And I could drive away.
Except, you idiot, you don’t know how to drive.
I could run. Just... run. Even as I thought it, I was slipping out of my shoes. The grass cold and damp andrealbeneath my feet. That was how bad I wanted to escape—my body was committed to action before I’d fully finished the thought. God. I wanted toRUN.
Run and do what? Go where? What about Zilla?
The thoughts were chains erupting out of the grass and wrapping around my feet.
Hands in fists, tears in my eyes, I opened my mouth ready to scream. Ready to let all the poison out, no matter who heard me. Let all of them hear me—Important Woman with the earrings, the Constantine children, the server who in another life might be my best friend—I’d go back in there in a minute and smile and thank them. Show them the stupid rock on my finger and blush and laugh, but now, let them stand in those rooms and know they were robbing me. Killing me. Let them—
“Jesus Christ, you okay?” a thick Irish accent asked from the darkness in the corner of the patio, and instead of screaming I kind of squeaked.
Which, honestly, was about right.
CHAPTER TWO
Icouldn’t seethe man in the shadows. It was nothing but dark out here, and then there was the red flare of a cigarette to my left, and I stepped back. Embarrassed and shaking, I tripped over my shoes. “I didn’t think anyone was here. I’ll go—”
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t... what?”
“Don’t leave.” Just that. And I was getting bossed around plenty in the house behind me, but no one managed to do it so plainly. It was all dressed up in manners. I was wrapped in chains of politeness. I didn’t know what it said about my mental health, but I liked the fact that he didn’t ask. And he wasn’t polite.
This whole situation was fucking me up.
He didn’t step forward to introduce himself, and I stepped away from him keeping my name to myself, too.
“You were just about to do the fifty-yard dash in a ball gown,” he said.
“Not... really.”
“Then you weren’t about to scream, neither.”
“No.” The lie came easy. So quick. Second nature now.
“Bullshit.”
“You know,youcould leave. Give me some privacy.”
His low laugh rippled out from the shadows, putting goosebumps up and down my arms. “Could I?”
“It would be polite.”
“I’m not much for polite,” he said and took another drag of his cigarette. “I like screaming better than running, though. Gets the blood up.”
“The blood up?” That sounded veryBraveheart. Truthfully, I liked it.