Page 17 of Promise of Destruction
“What is this?” He asks, his eyes drifting from the paper in his hands to me as I take another long sip from the liquor, letting the burn soothe the harsh words off of my tongue.
“As the CEO of Kline Press, I’d think you’d recognize your own newspaper.” I hold a hand out for him to pass it back, and he glances down at it one last time before relinquishing it.
“I have many papers.” He shrugs, as if that explains his general lack of a brain.
“Indeed, you do. Which is why when one of them publishes something so…egregious, the others will follow. You see my problem.”
“I… no.” He shakes his head, because the guy probably couldn’t see the problem if I hit him over the head with it.
I let him stew in his obvious discomfort for a moment as I stare at him, before I break into a small grin.
“You may need to get your prescription updated.” I tease, gesturing to his glasses. My air of pleasantry puts him at ease enough to laugh, too. “I’ll read you an excerpt from the article. You can hear just fine, can’t you?”
“Oh,” He chuckles. “Yes, I’ve got the ears of a hawk, go on.” He waves me on, and I make a concerted effort not to entertain that ludicrous response.
“Blackstone Industries, just one of the many holdings owned by Evergreen Industries, operates on a back-alley, pay-for-play basis. But perhaps the most insidious thing about the company is the man at the helm: Declan Evers, a millionaire with a penchant for power and attention. Of all the rumors that circle the mysterious figurehead of the dirty-dealings companies he owns, perhaps the most terrifying isn’t that he has bought his power. Indeed, the most terrifying part about a savage man with too much power isn’t what happens when it goes to his head—it’s what happens when he loses it.”
The words still chase a fire through my veins, but it’s blunted by the woman who I now know wrote them. My desire to punish Soren for this bad decision is just as great as my desire to bring her to her knees in my worship.
But first things first. Pain must come before the pleasure if she’s ever to truly understand the depth of what she’s gotten herself into.
And she may not know it yet, but that pain is right around the corner for her.
twelve
Soren
Ifallasleeponthe couch by accident, my laptop hanging precariously off the edge of my lap. I’ve clicked out of Declan’s face, but it still haunts me. I think his breath on my neck is what woke me, but I’m alone in my house—the prison that I come back to, day after day. I prove it to myself by holding my breath, and when no sound pierces the silence, I set my computer on the ground and let the air rush out of my chest, falling back on the cushions.
I’ve felt small most of my life, but never as much as I have since Vin died. Being told that I suffer from delusions, that the grief messed with my memory, that I am the most likely suspect in the murder of my own fiancé—it all made me smaller.
I had to makemyselfsmaller, to minimize the target.
Marissa and Khan did their best to shield me from the horrors of gossipers and liars alike, but I’d seen the articles eventually. Even the articles hadn’t been the worst part though. I could stomach reading about the brutal murder by the time I found the strength to sift through all of them, but the comments and theposts on social media by strangers who’d never heard of either Vin or me? Those, I couldn’t stomach.
I still can’t.
Every part of my life became fair game, and apparently, open season lasts all year.
The first few weeks out of the hospital, I had so many mostly-hateful messages on social media that I deleted all of my profiles and reached out to Khan, begging him to scrub all traces of them.
As a social media analyst, it wasn’t terribly hard for him to reach out to all the right people and make sure it happened. The print stuff, though? That wasn’t so easy to clean up. I saw my face on magazines until I stopped going to the store and exclusively ordered delivery, and I heard my name when I flipped mindlessly through the television channels. Soren D’Anerio became synonymous with ‘black widow’, so I had to kill that persona. While Soren isn’t exactly a common name for women, most people don’t put two and two together unless they’re actually into true crime, and as a general rule, I avoid true crime spaces.
It's only been five months that I’ve been working again.If you can’t beat them, I’d decided,join them. I knew no one reputable would want to hire someone touted by the media as the Mafia Murderess—stupid nickname courtesy of Luc—so I changed my name from the diminutive form I’ve gone by my entire life—Ren— to my legal birth name. I took my middle name as my surname and signed on all the dotted lines, and even to this day, the idiots I work with don’t realize I’m the same woman they were touting as a murderer mere months ago, even in spite of the police visit this afternoon.
Without Vin, the finances looked a whole lot different. Never mind the fact that he’d earned the money for our every bill, he also handled the payments on them. Not only did I not knowthe passwords and account numbers I needed to access my own utilities, but his loss also meant I had to figure out which ones to keep paying for and which to set aside.
Tony helped me extensively in that time, since I’d been nothing more than a housewife before I became a house-widow.
Before I overhauled what’s left of my life, I laid on the couch, much like I am in the moment, and wondered why I didn’t die too.
Who could be so cruel as to kill him, to stealeverythingthat mattered to me, and then leave me to clean up the mess? Had they tried to kill me when they slit my wrists, or did they not go deep enough on purpose? Did theyintendto frame me for the murder by staging me in the bathtub, naked and dying in a pool of blood—both mine and his? Did they beat me so badly that my body ached for weeks just to prove that they were there, despite any proof otherwise?
Or,the voice in my head whispers. She has no body, but she’s a snake who slips into my consciousness and coils around my thoughts, making me doubt myself.Maybe you just don’t remember it.
Every time she slithers inside of my brain, she tries to take control, and I lose everything. All of the progress I’ve made evaporates into the ether the moment her proverbial silver tongue dances in my ear. I hate her… maybe Ididtry to cut her out of me.
No.
