Chapter 16 Evie
Evie
Hearing the ring of truth in her words, I relaxed a little. Finally, she was taking something for herself. “Because of Reid?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
That was definitely a lie. I could see it on her face, in the way her heart rate jumped on the monitor beside the bed, but it was a lie I wasn’t going to call her out on. Guys and what they did to our hearts was a complication I didn’t have the energy to think about too hard at the moment.
“I overheard his mom talking on the phone when I first got here,” I told her. “She was trying to call him. Whatever he’s doing, he wasn’t answering his phone. Mila and Sammy both said they tried texting him with no response either.”
“He’s probably busy with work,” Evy said with a shrug. She gave me an assessing stare. “What’s the deal with you and the bloodhound? When I got home this morning, you were snuggled up on the couch together. Did you get lucky too?”
If by lucky she meant I got my first-ever orgasm, followed by countless others, then yes. I, for sure, got lucky. “He said he wants to take things slow,” I deflected, not wanting to talk about Chance.
“He does?”
She seemed surprised, and honestly, I had been too.
Surprised and disappointed. He’d been all over me, made me feel like there was no one else in the world but the two of us.
I wanted him with the kind of desperate selfishness that I was assuming came with the first taste of physical love.
The man had no problem fucking anything with a pulse—with apparently me being the exception.
From the look in her eyes, I knew my twin wasn’t going to drop this particular subject, so I told her a little of what had happened the night before.
“We made out and stuff. But then he just…stopped. Chance said he doesn’t want to rush me, but I don’t think he wants me the way I want him,” I confided.
“If he did, he wouldn’t have been able to stop in the middle of what we were doing.
I mean, he was acting like he couldn’t bear to have more than an inch of space between us all night, and there I was, ready to give him everything. It felt right, you know?”
She nodded, a small, secret smile tipping one side of her lips. “Yeah, that’s how it was for me.”
“And Reid couldn’t stop?”
“I think if I’d said I wasn’t ready, he would have,” she said softly.
“Chance has a reputation. I heard multiple people talking about him last night at Hannigans’.
He hooks up with a different girl every weekend.
Sometimes a different one every time he goes to the bar.
” It still burned to think about those girls outside the bathroom, whispering about him, hearing the yearning in their voices, the reverence.
Now that I’d gotten a taste of what they were talking about, I understood it a little better. And it drove me crazy.
Why did they get a part of him he wasn’t willing to give me?
What was so wrong with me that he couldn’t offer me the same as everyone else?
“If he wanted me, he would have taken what I was offering,” I muttered. “What, he can fuck every other girl who looks twice at him, but he won’t even show me his dick?”
“Evie, I don’t think that’s the case.” My sister surprised me by defending him. “I’ll admit I didn’t like him when I first met him yesterday. But from my perspective, I think he’s wild for you. Maybe he doesn’t want to risk screwing up what you two have. He doesn’t want to scare you.”
“I’m so confused where he’s concerned,” I confessed. “When Abi called to tell me you were in the hospital, I was a mess and couldn’t drive. He insisted on bringing me. It’s all a blur until we got here. And then I met Rory.”
Evy jolted and went tense at the mention of her name. “I can only guess how fun that was,” she gritted out, nose scrunching.
“She didn’t speak directly to me, but from what little I heard, she’s not a fan of either of us.” Which was the understatement of the century, but I didn’t want to cause Evy more distress. Heart clenching at the memory, I blinked back a fresh wave of tears, only for my sister to tug on my hand.
Without hesitation, I climbed into bed with her and hugged her tight, needing her comfort more than she could ever understand. The last twenty-four hours had been a roller coaster.
“People suck, Evie. Not everyone is going to want to be our friend. Some people are too small-minded to even try to understand. I’m so sorry you have to learn that the hard way.” She rubbed my back, still taking care of me, continuing to be my strength even when she was the one in a hospital bed.
“There are a lot of lessons I still need to be taught. Even if it hurts, I’m thankful that I’m learning them now and not after I gave my whole heart away.”
“Giving your heart to someone doesn’t mean you’re weak, Evie.”
“Even if they don’t deserve it?”
Evy tightened her arms around me, and I realized I’d said those words aloud. I didn’t want to add my foolish love for a guy I was certain didn’t know how to earn my heart to my sister’s growing list of things she thought she needed to fix for me.
“Loving people says you’re someone with a big heart.
Whether they deserve it speaks more about them than it ever would about you.
” She lifted her head from my shoulder and tenderly brushed a few tear-soaked strands of hair from my face.
“Is that why you’re so ready to pack up and leave?
Because of the bloo—um, because of Chance? ”
Why she’d settled on “Bloodhound” for his nickname, I was still confused about, but I had to admit it was funny. “No, I suggested it because I thought you were upset about the whole Vaughn thing and didn’t want to live in the same town as the man who killed Dad…William.”
All the air whooshed from Evy like I’d physically hit her. Her already-pale face went ghostly white. “Evie, what are you talking about?”
And we were back to her being frustratingly overprotective. “Oh, come on, Evy. Did you honestly think I didn’t know about that?”
“A-about wh-what?” she stuttered.
“The night William died, I almost did too.” She flinched, but we couldn’t avoid this any longer.
It was festering between us. “Vaughn. Well, I guess you know him as Ghost. He gave me something that made me vomit up the pills I’d swallowed, and then he stayed with me until the paramedics arrived.
The entire time I was puking my guts out, sobbing so hard I was shaking, he was right there with me.
Talking. About you, his sister, even his wife.
Sometimes he would switch to Russian, and I wasn’t even sure if he realized it or not.
But his tone never changed. He was kind to me. ”
I owed Vaughn a debt I couldn’t repay for staying with me for the short time it had taken for the first responders to arrive.
“You… You never told me that,” Evy said hoarsely.
“I didn’t want to put more images of that night in your head than you already had.
And honestly, I was so out of it, I didn’t know what was real and what was a hallucination until I saw him again last night.
” I shrugged like this wasn’t one of the most life-changing conversations we’d ever had.
It wasn’t simply about my failed self-elimination attempt.
Our father had died that night, and it had, in fact, changed our entire lives.
“Vaughn came to pick up Abi, and all the memories flooded in again. Not long after he arrived, he and Abi took me aside while Chance was at the bar getting us drinks, and they told me their side of everything.”
“What do you mean, their side?”
I reminded her of how she’d been reckless while looking for solutions to rescue me, told her about how Vaughn had found her, Abi talking him into offering his assistance, and why he was willing to involve himself in our troubles.
Vaughn/Ghost was a vigilante who focused on taking down human trafficking.
I was still struggling with the reality of William being a key player in such a horrific crime.
“I never knew William was responsible for that, Evy. I never suspected.”
“Of course you didn’t suspect anything,” she readily defended.
“He was keeping you locked in a house with limited outside access. You didn’t even have a phone.
The only television you were allowed to watch was Netflix, and even then, he had a freaking parental lock on the mature content.
All your homeschool lessons were prerecorded.
You had no control, Evie. How could you possibly have guessed what he was capable of?
You got a side of him that no one knew existed. ”
“I should have, though,” I argued, feeling sick.
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because… I don’t know, okay? I just should have known.
He manipulated me into thinking I couldn’t leave the house.
Made me think it was my fault, that there was something wrong with me.
And I believed him.” Self-deprecation filled me.
If I’d paid more attention, if I’d been smarter, maybe I would have figured it out and found a way to leave.
“I never once questioned him, not until after our mom died. When he said you couldn’t come live with us, that was when it started to dawn on me that something was wrong. I was stupid. Gullible. Naive.”
Nothing. Always nothing.
Shut the fuck up, William!
“God, it makes me sick how easy it was for him to bend me to his will.”
“You loved him,” she said so gently it broke my heart a little.
I had loved him.
And that knowledge was a spear to the heart every dang day. Maybe some deep, shattered piece of me still did. He was my father and the only person who had been a constant in my life for twenty-one years.
But my hate overpowered any love that still lingered.
It was easy to give away my heart—to my dad, to Chance.
It was so damn hard to keep it safe.