Chapter 17 – Amanda
My mouth felt as though I’d eaten cotton.
The top of my tongue was sand, and I tried to swallow, only to realize it was rough and dry.
When I tried again, swallowing made my throat ache.
As awareness trickled to the surface, my entire body pulsed with one tidal wave of agony.
I rolled over with a groan, flailing for the glass of water I kept on the nightstand.
It was there, along with the bottle of sleeping pills.
Crap, how many did I take?
I pushed onto my elbow, picked up the glass, and forced myself to drain it. It took a tremendous effort to stagger out of bed and into the bathroom.
Funny, for how dehydrated I felt my bladder was full.
I smacked at the toilet tissue, and something looked off in the blue glow of my nightlight. After washing my hands, I turned on the light. There, in the crook of my arm, was an ugly bruise. The kind that mean nurses gave when they couldn’t find the vein.
Horror washed through me.
“What day is it?” I croaked.
I didn’t remember last night. Had I gone to the club and fallen in with a bad crowd? What was pulsing through my system at this moment? Drugs most likely.
Staggering back to my bed, I picked up my phone. Dead. It wasn’t sitting on the pad, go figure. I moved as fast as my body would allow, going to the kitchen and sagging with relief when the clock on the stove said 1:06. I still had hours to sleep before my alarm rang at five.
Plugging my phone in, I went for another glass of water. It was a good thing I drained it and set the glass down before my phone restarted.
It wasn’t morning.
It was afternoon. Tuesday afternoon. Which meant—
“The trial!” I fumbled with the device.
Missed calls, messages, and emails flooded the screen. My chest cracked in agony as I desperately tried to undo the mistakes of last night.
But it was Steven’s text that sent my brain short-circuiting.
British Babe: Thanks for last night. Sorry, I passed out, but I really enjoyed the show.
“No, no!” I gasped, slapping my hand over my mouth.
Pieces of memory came back in sharp bursts, exploding with images behind my eyes. I was going to seduce my fiancé. My world was rocked by my stalker. There was something achingly familiar about him, and when he made me come, I cried. And then—
I slapped a hand over my neck.
“I wish I could tell you it was going to get better, Mandy, but it’s not.”
There was little doubt in my mind that I missed the trial because of him. This was his revenge. He wasn’t here to bring me the happily-ever-after of my dark romance novels.
No…he was the devil, come to destroy my world and ruin my life.
Ignoring the big problem that was my job, I dialed a number. I cut off Nicole’s greeting with a strangled outburst. “Where is Vincenzo?”
“Um….” My sister was no doubt looking at her phone as if it was possessed.
Maybe I was.
“Nicole Karin Loring, answer me now,” I shrieked.
“It’s Messina, not Loring,” a deep bass corrected. “And my brother is with my dad.”
I slumped against the kitchen island. Boston—Vincenzo was in Boston.
“Where was he last night?” I demanded, still clinging to the delusion that I could make sense of the nightmare that was my life.
It’s all a bad dream. I have to wake up now.
“He was at Mama Ana’s Bar & Grill. We had a family dinner,” my brother-in-law supplied unhelpfully. “What’s going on, Amanda?”
Tears leaked from the corner of my eyes.
Oh, lord, I cried. Last night. If it wasn’t a dream, if I didn’t take too many sleeping pills, then I cried after the masked man ate me out.
“Nothing,” I wheezed. “Nothing at all. Just…goodbye, Cristiano. Take care of my sister.”
I ended the call.
The damn thing started vibrating a second later, but I ignored her call. This was a complete and utter disaster. While it was highly improbable that the masked man and he-who-shall-not-be-named were one and the same, it was just plausible enough to believe it could have been the case.
Dropping my head back against the counter, I squeezed my eyes closed. “This cannot be happening. This cannot be happening!”
Villainous laughter cackled in the recesses of my mind. There was no escaping the present. I was caught. I had to play the cards I was dealt—and what a fucking shitty hand it was.
***
I had to kiss my promotion goodbye. Wednesday morning, I showed up at work early to hear the news that I’d been taken off the list for consideration for the senior partnership. One of the goons in HR asked if I really was serious about my path at Kirk & Wallace.
In the space of a single day, my hard work culminated in disaster.
I was put on drafting that should have been doled out to a paralegal—maybe an associate.
Not a junior partner. I tried to plead with Carter Lewis that I could still help on the case, attend the trial from the spectator’s bench instead of sitting behind the chairs in the courtroom.
He squinted at me with those beady eyes, and his chest heaved as he laughed.
Yeah, that was never happening again.
All because the stalker promised that it wasn’t getting any better.
As I was leaving the office late at night on Wednesday, that Nadine stopped me.
“Everything okay in paradise?” The way she phrased the question meant she already knew the answer, and the casual tone was merely the cover to instigate a response.
“Yes, it’s been a rough forty-eight hours, but I’m back.” I gave her my most winning smile. My new motto was not to let it show when salt rubbed the wounds. Kill them with kindness or some shit. “That stomach bug sure did a number on me.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that.” Nadine folded her spectacles and put them in her alligator clutch.
Poor gator.
“What I meant was you didn’t receive any flowers today.”
I blinked down at her. How did this woman—this woman who made the mad scientist who refused to sew capes for the superhero cartoon family look pretty—realize what I hadn’t? It was Wednesday. For the past five Wednesdays, I had received a bouquet of flowers.
I always pretended they were from Steven, because any other explanation was too horrible.
After facing my nightmare, I couldn’t ignore reality.
“Oh, yup. But everything’s great,” I choked out. Grabbing my phone, I gave Nadine a little wave, took off down the hall, and ducked into an empty conference room to make this call.
“Hey, love, what’s up?” Steven did his best impression of an American accent.
“Just wondering if we could repeat Monday night?” I tried to sound sexy, but I was working too hard to form the right words.
“Monday night?” Steven switched to British. “What happened Monday night?”
The floor tilted, and I had to fall back into a chair. “You don’t remember?”
He did text me, right?
I pulled my phone back, looked through our messages, and instantly felt the urge to puke. There was no text from him.
“I don’t want to remember,” he scoffed. “I was hungover as shit yesterday. Did we see each other at the bar Monday night?”
“We crossed paths. Say, where did the flowers go?” I added, brain panicking. There was no logic to any of this. I didn’t know what possessed me to call, or why I started with that question.
“Flowers? What flowers? You hate flowers.” Steven sounded concerned. “Is everything alright, love? Are you having cold feet about the wedding?”
I bit my knuckles to keep from screaming. “Everything’s lovely, darling. I’ll see you in Martha’s Vineyard Friday night.”
The call disconnected before I let out a groan of desperation. I hadn’t wanted to admit the stalker was real when I should have been preparing to have him ruin my life.
One mind fuck at a time.