Page 97 of Souls and Sorrows

Looking up, I meet Ariana’s glassy gaze from across the hall as my mother pushes around me, taking the elevator down.

I know, I think to myself.That’s why I want them at my mercy.

29

The next timeI go to my mother’s apartment out of town, Cash seems incredibly reluctant to allow me to go on my own.

Against my better judgment, I let him tag along, picking at my fingernails the entire trip up. Nerves tie my stomach into knots, and I spend the ride trying to nitpick everything about me so that when we get there, her jabs won’t hurt.

Cash has no idea who we’re going to see, and I want to keep it that way until the very last possible moment. When it comes to Carmen Ricci, the less he knows, the better.

He reaches over the console and takes my hand in his, rubbing his thumb over the diamond ring on my finger. I watch him caress it, as if it wasn’t a piece of torture equipment and instead a simple staple of his love.

His love.Discomfort lodges in my throat as I think about those three words I swear he almost said the other day.

The real horror wasn’t that he felt them though—it’s how desperate I apparently am to hear him say it. As if my entire life has been leading up to this one single moment, for someone to see me at my worst and still want me anyway.

He knows things no one else does. Except Kal maybe and only because he’s better at disposing of evidence than I am. Otherwise, I’d be sealed up tight like a vault, and no one but Cash Primrose would have the key.

I don’t know why exactly it’s so easy for me to open up to him, but regardless, I have, and I can’t take any of that back. Not even when our little union ends and all I’m left with is the knowledge that I did something good for younger me.

Even if present me winds up unhappy and alone, I can deal with that.

“Are you ever going to let me take this ring off?” I ask him.

He curls a finger protectively around the jewelry. “The whole point of it is to show others you’re off the market. Why would you want to take it off?”

“Well, for starters, it hurts.”

His head turns, and he flashes me that smile—the bright one that seems to be just for me. “You don’t seem to mind a little pain when you choke on my dick at night or when I paint your ass blood red with my hand.”

My face heats, and I press a palm to my cheek. “But I ask you to do that.”

Slowly, he withdraws from me and drapes his wrist over the steering wheel, and it feels like an absolute loss. The kind that lingers in the back of your throat, a hole that won’t ever close.

I want to reach out and pull him back to me, but my hands are superglued to my lap, refusing to move.

Swallowing becomes impossible, and I suddenly feel like I fucked up.

“I-I’ll still wear it. It’s not a big deal.”

Cash’s smile slips away. “What?”

A tremor works its way through me, and I fall farther down the rabbit hole of panic. Squeezing my hands together until they ache, I try to suppress the trembling.

Staccato breaths escape me, and it starts to feel like I’m floating, detached from myself as I try to get my heartbeat under control. It pounds between my ears like a gong someone won’t stop hitting, and nausea curdles in my stomach, threatening to unleash everywhere.

Memories flash across my vision, painting my past in heavy reds and blacks—bruises that look like constellations, blood that looks like a broken kaleidoscope spread across the tiles.

Color in the form of sound—angry, throaty admonishments and unnatural, unwanted moans.

Sobs. Mine and hers because I couldn’t even feelpainwithout her commandeering it.

Anything I felt got undermined by her perception and experiences until those feelings were warped and twisted on an axis.

Until it was me who was in the wrong.

Me who she was angry with, for a multitude of reasons.

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