Page 82 of Leah

“Will you be staying in your hometown long?”

“Is it the end of Fatal Rebellion? Is that why you’ve all gone separate ways?”

Then there were the fans. Angry women, pointing at me, shrieking obscenities.

“Heartbreaker!”

“Whore!”

I felt anger, wanting nothing more than to wrangle these bitches to the ground. I kept myself in check, though, remembering my promise not even twenty seconds ago. I didn’tneed a catfight under my belt, but god, they sure loved to provoke it, didn’t they?

Carter navigated through the crowd, looking down, saying nothing. I did the same, keeping my eyes glued to my sneakers, painfully aware of how horrible I looked. My hair fell over parts of my face, and I could only pray it was enough to keep my identity hidden.

We approached a black BMW, and I knew Rome was inside. Carter opened the passenger door and I quickly climbed in. Looking toward the front, Rome sat behind the wheel, dressed in a hat and sunglasses. He frowned at me in the rear-view mirror, shaking his head in frustration.

The crowd had followed us out to the car, and Carter ended up shoving more people out of the way to get inside. Just as he turned, a hand grabbed at him, and flashing lights of the man’s camera went off in Carter’s face. I heard Carter curse as he turned and landed a punch across the man’s face.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” I heard him growl out.

Huh, so much for taking the ugly.

Without waiting, he slipped into the car, panting hard, stretching out the hand he used to punch the man. The man himself had a crowd surrounding him, taking pictures of him sprawled on the ground with his hand clutched to the side of his face.

This had escalated beyond anything I could imagine.

“Fuck!” hollered Rome as he attempted to manoeuvre through the crowd, honking on the horn at least a dozen times as people continued to take pictures and scream. “This is fucked up, man.”

“You shouldn’t have left the fucking bodyguards behind,” Carter retorted, staring out the window with flared nostrils.

“Oh, so it’s my fault, huh? I told you not to leave the goddamn fucking house!”

I tensed as they argued, feeling uncomfortably out of place.

When Rome finally managed to get away, he pressed down hard on the gas and took off down the road, going way over the speed limit. My body harshly fell back as he took it over a hundred kilometres an hour.

“You need to calm down,” Carter told him. “I know we fucked up, alright? Just calm the fuck down.”

“I wanted one visit with my parents without one single incident,” Rome fumed. “The dickheads out there had only just stopped waiting outside their house, and now they’ll be all over it again! How do you think my parents are going to take their privacy being violated once more now that everyone knows we were here? And now it’s due to something that could have completely been avoided had you not fucking left the house! How hard is it to stay under one roof? You couldn’t just call Leah over? You had to do a runner? They’re going to take to the news with this. You’re going to get smeared—”

“I don’t fucking care about my image, Rome—”

“—they’re going to drag the whole Molly shit into this—”

“Well, fuck Molly! The hell do I care about her? I broke it off with that girl, told her I wasn’t into her, and she still came around.”

“Nobody cares, Carter. They get to decide the story, not you. They’re going to drag Leah into this too, you asshole!”

Carter went silent, running an exasperated hand through his hair. He looked a downright mess.

“They’re going to antagonize Leah,” Rome continued, talking about me as if I wasn’t there. “Make her out to be some relationship breaking slut. Is that what you wanted? Congratu-fucking-lations if it is.”

“Of course it isn’t!” Carter growled back.

“I told you to hold off on her, man. I told you to fucking wait.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” I suddenly intervened. “I agreed to everything Carter said, and more.”

Rome glanced at me in the mirror, like he’d just remembered I was there. “You have to lay low, Leah.”

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