Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 127201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 636(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 424(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 636(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 424(@300wpm)
I stand in my room, taking it all in, when I pull my phone up and find Chloe’s number. I press on her contact before lifting it to my ear, listening with a broken heart as the phone rings once and then twice.
“Hey, you forget something?” Chloe asks, answering the call.
“You need to come back. Our place has been ransacked—”
“Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a deep tone says from behind me.
I whip around, my eyes widening as I find Jordan standing in my bedroom doorway. He’s dressed in all black with a baseball bat in his hand, and all hope drains out of me, leaving me terrified and cold.
“What do you mean our place has been ransacked? Is somebody there?” Chloe questions, a slight panic in her tone. “Tilly? What’s going on?”
Jordan’s lips twist with a sickening smirk, and he lunges before I even have a chance to react, the bat already swinging through the air.
“SHIT. CHLOE. CALL THE POLICE,” I scream, just milliseconds before the bat comes down over my temple like a crack of lightning smacking into the side of my head. My body flies across the destroyed room, and before I’ve even hit the floor, everything turns black.
25
CAESAR
Stepping back, I look over the engine of the 1967 cherry-red Mustang that Zephyr and I have spent the last few years rebuilding. It’s been a passion project, something for us to work on when work or college weren’t kicking our asses, and lately, that seems to be all the time.
This beauty is just about done, and after this past week, she’s seen more work than ever before. She’s been the perfect distraction to keep my mind off a certain little vixen who does nothing but cause me hell.
I think I did the right thing, pushing her away. Had I not, she eventually would have seen me for who I really am, seen the monster hidden within, and she would have run. I meant every fucking word when I told her that she deserved better. As for me, she would have changed my whole fucking world.
This past week, not being able to see her or even text her has fucking killed me. I’ve checked in on her here and there, looking in on the surveillance system I had installed, but for the most part, I’ve tried to give her space. It does me no good watching her crumble on her couch, throwing chocolate cookies up in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth, only to miss them and eat them directly off the floor.
She’s had a rough week—that much is clear from the snippets of surveillance I’ve checked in on. She didn’t leave the apartment at all, just stayed curled up on that couch, and it damn near killed me knowing that I did that to her. She didn’t even pay attention to her classes, simply watched the online lectures before folding her laptop up and pushing it away.
As I finish up and slam the hood closed, my phone starts ringing from my workbench. I move across the garage, wiping my hands on an old rag before scooping it up and quickly answering it before it goes to voicemail.
“You should see her,” I tell my son, knowing he knows I’m referring to the Mustang. “She’s almost done.”
“Dad, she’s been taken,” Zeph rushes out in a panic, the tone in his voice something I’ve never heard before. “We just dropped her at home, and then she called Chloe saying their apartment had been ransacked, but when she was on the phone—”
“Slow down. What the fuck are you talking about? Who’s been taken?”
“Tilly,” he says as though I should have already plucked her name out of his head. “She’s fucking gone. Someone took her.”
“What?” I shake my head. That’s not possible. I know I haven’t checked in on her today, but surely she’s just been chilling on the couch, or playing with that new T-shirt making thing she got. But her place being ransacked? No. Surely I would have known. “She was taken? By who?”
Pulling my phone away from my ear, I put the call on speakerphone before swiping through the pages of apps clogging my phone until finally finding the Di Rozé surveillance app. I walk inside my home, having no fucking idea where I’m going, only that I need to keep moving as my whole world seems to shut down.
The app goes too fucking slowly despite being the best on the market, and when it finally comes up, I find Chloe and Zeph standing inside the destroyed apartment, Chloe talking on the phone—hopefully to the police.
“Holy fucking shit,” I breathe, taking it all in as I watch Chloe collapse onto the ruined coffee table while Zeph paces, his fists in tight balls.