Chapter 59
While I’m lying in bed next to Jeremy, trying to fall asleep, my phone rings on the nightstand.
I pick it up without really thinking about it. I haven’t gotten any threatening calls in over a week, and my guard is down. And instead of a blocked number, the call is coming from an actual phone number. But the second I hear the voice at the other end of the line, I realize my mistake.
“You better be careful when you go to sleep tonight,” that now familiar voice hisses at me. “Because I’m going to burn down the house with you inside.”
I yank the phone away from my ear as if the phone itself is on fire. When I look at the screen again, the call has ended.
Jeremy stirs on the mattress beside me. “Ronnie? Who was that?”
“Naomi,” I blurt out before I can stop myself.
He is instantly awake, struggling into a sitting position. He rubs his eyes. “Naomi? What are you talking about?”
“She…” I didn’t tell him about the threatening phone calls before because I didn’t want to poke the dragon, but he needs to know what she’s been doing to me. “Naomi has been making threatening phone calls to me. She’s been doing it for weeks.”
A vein pops out in his temple like it always does lately when the topic of Naomi comes up. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see your phone.”
“She usually blocks her number, although I recognize her voice.” I pass my phone over to him. “But this time there’s a real number there. Is that her phone number?”
He clicks on the number and holds my phone to his ear. From this distance, I can hear the mechanical voice reciting an away message. “I bet she got a burner phone.”
“You think she’d do that?”
Jeremy looks at me for a moment as if debating whether to tell me something. Finally, he grabs his own phone and starts scrolling on the screen. “I’d like you to see exactly what she’s capable of.”
A second later, he holds up his phone to show me a photo he took. It takes me a second to figure out what it is, and now I think I’m going to be sick.
It’s Dominic’s elephant. The only thing I have left of my little baby. And Naomi stuck a knife in it and squirted some red sauce all over it.
“I found this in a drawer at her apartment,” he tells me.
“I didn’t want to show it to you, because I thought it would upset you, but I think you need to know what we’re dealing with here.
This is why I’ve been scared to leave her.
” He sets his jaw. “This is why we have to keep Teddy away from her.”
I can’t stop staring at the photograph on the screen. My poor elephant. She massacred him. And the worst part?
If we were ever alone together, she would do much worse to me.