Page 116 of Nikola

She chuckled after reading it. “He’s just worried about you and wants to make sure you’re alright.”

I am fine, or I will be once I come up with a plan.

She read my sentence and her eyebrow rose in surprise.

“Plan?” I nodded and she questioned, “To get your man back?” I nodded my answer, causing her to chuckle. “You’re your father’s daughter, that’s for sure.”

I started writing again.

Thank you…?

She smiled. “It’s definitely a compliment.”

I always wondered how my papa knew Dr. Freud. When I questioned him about it, he just said she helped him once, and since she was married into another mob family now, she could be trusted not to yap to the authorities.

“I think it’s good you’re not giving up,” Dr. Freud continued. “Although, I would caution you not to project your emotions and feelings onto the man.”

Anger flared inside my chest and I wrote my next words with a harsher press of the pen.

He loves me too.

“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” she said slowly, and my eyes turned into slits.

Loveisenough,

I wrote, underlining “is” multiple times.

Nikola thinks he isn’t good enough now that he can’t run, but that’s bullshit. It’s like me saying I’m not enough because I can’t hear.

She scanned the words and tilted her head pensively. “Yes, I see your point.”

But did she really? Or was this just another one of those vague therapist comments that led you to come to your own conclusion?

NIKOLA

It was a new year, but my legs were still just as useless, and so was my mind sometimes.

I’d been bound to a wheelchair for two months now, the lowest point in more ways than one. I continued seeing the therapist that my mother had insisted on and it was my own personal hell these days, although I wasn’t sure that I didn’t deserve it.

“The best thing one can do when handicapped is to know our limits.” Dr. MaryAnn’s words were slowly but surely killing me. “And don’t put others in a position where they have to do something out of pity for you.”

As we sat in her office in downtown New Orleans, her expression was a mixture of pity, disgust, and… was it shame? Either way, it was working like the worst kind of poison.

“I see,” I gritted out with so much pent-up energy rolling off my Brioni three-piece suit, I was surprised I didn’t perish right then and there. Over the holidays, my uncle’s words had kept playing on repeat in my mind and I’d started to consider them, but now… yeah, fuck that.

I didn’t want anyone’s pity, least of all Skye’s.

My therapist’s black eyes zeroed in on me, almost as if waiting for the moment to strike. But I wouldn’t let her.

“Do you have any useful suggestions?” I drawled. “Or are you done for the day?”

“All the wrongdoings have a way of getting their payback,” she stated.

Triumph oozed from her dead eyes while chaos reigned in my own. Irritation flared through every fiber of me, rising higher and higher until it was suffocating me. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman was right. The consequences of my actions had caught up to me after years of stupid shenanigans and reckless behavior.

It was time I cut that shit out. Maybe this was payback to teach me some fucked-up humility. Though I didn’t see much sense in it.

“So therapists believe in karma, huh?” I retorted wryly.