Page 44 of Ruin Me Gently

I’d destroy every single thing I’d worked for before I ever subjected her to that.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Are you going tooffer me any advice or are you just going to sit there?”

Katniss didn’t even twitch. She remained a perfect little pancake, sprawled out on my stomach, her tiny arms spread wide like she’d collapsed after a particularly exhausting day of doing absolutely nothing.

I squinted down at her. “Oh? You think I should shut the hell up?”

She cracked open one eye, stared at me for a beat, then promptly closed it again.

I sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

Lizard therapy wasn’t helping me tonight.

My brain had become one of those malfunctioning vending machines. The kind where you put your money in, press the button for chips, but instead of dispensing them, it just whirrs loudly, eats your change, and shoots you the metaphorical, electrical version of the middle finger.

Except instead of chips, my brain was stuck onhim.

The sight of him standing on the sidewalk, frozen,wavingat me like I hadn’t just caught him lurking in the shadows, leaving gifts at my doorstep like some hooded, half-scarved, deranged six-foot-five tooth fairy.

And come to think of it, the gifts had started before I’d caught him on my doorstep. Before the grab. Before I even knew he existed.

Had he been following me before that?

Watching me?

The thought should’ve made me sick, should’ve sent ice-cold nausea rolling through my gut, should’ve made my skin crawl right off my body. And itdid. Sort of.

I mean. It should have.

But it didn’t. Not completely.

Because instead of horror, instead of fear, there was something else winding its way throughmy stomach.

One question.

Why?

I glanced down at Katniss, scratching under her chin. “It’s weird, right?”

She didn’t care. Not even a little bit. But I did.

Because those gifts? They weren’t normal. They weren’t random. They’d been too well thought-out.

Clark would never have put that much effort into anything unless it directly benefited him. He would have made a grand show of it, used it as leverage, a bargaining chip to wave in my face whenever it suited him.

‘Remember when I bought you that thing?’

‘Remember what a great boyfriend I was?’

He’d never paid attention. He didn’t remember that I hated roses or that I only drank oat milk because dairy turned me into a ticking time bomb. He didn’t remember the books I loved, the songs that made my chest ache, or the little things that warmed me from the inside out.

Him giving me gifts had never been about him noticing something about me. They were transactions. Tokens meant to earn forgiveness, affection, control. He gave to get. That’s all it was.

But I had beensocertain that it was him. So sure that his love-bombing, his desperate attempts to drag me back, had simply escalated into something more personal. Because who else would it have been?

I ran my thumb over the cool metal in my hand, tracing the ridges and edges like I was trying to decipher some kind of secret message. The box he’d left on my doorstep the morning I’d caught him hadn’t been some cryptic little offering. No, it had been a full-on self-defence kit. A keychain with pepper spray, a personal alarm, and one of those tactical knuckle things designed to jab straight into someone’s throat.

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