Page 10 of Promise of Destruction (Destruction & Vengeance Duet #1)

ten

Soren

Tony offers to stay. He practically insists, really, but I don’t think having him here will make any difference.

I’m not sleeping tonight, even though I don’t think whoever was creeping outside of my window will be back.

After an hour of insisting that I am truly fine, I don’t think he believes me.

But it’s enough for him to relent, as long as I promise to lock the door and keep my phone on me.

He mentioned security cameras, but I’m not sure that will help either. At least, it won’t help me feel safe.

I haven’t felt that way in a year—since before Vin died. And even if I ever get back a sense of peace, it won’t be in my own home.

Too much has happened here.

There’s no way I’m sleeping now, even though I’m tired from the aftereffects of the adrenaline. Every inch of my skin crawls with the feeling of some stranger’s eyes on me, leaving me feeling dirty and disgusted.

But I can’t walk back in there to shower—not yet. And I’m certainly not going near the upstairs bathroom, so I’ll have to stew in the effects of my griminess until morning and shower before work.

And speaking of work, that’s probably the best distraction I’m going to get. I have a piece to finish about the new traffic pattern on the Lower East Side, and if any sort of monotony will numb my brain, it’s that.

My office faces the same side of the house as my bathroom, which means walking to it is unnerving enough, let alone stepping foot in there, sure to avoid glancing toward the window.

There’s no way I can sit in my big wingback chair facing away from the window, leaving myself completely unaware if someone was out there.

The feeling of being watched lingers on my spine like a hot breath from a stranger; If I stay in there, I’ll be turning around every two minutes just to make sure nobody was on the other side of my glass.

Instead of sinking into my office, I snatch my laptop off the desk and force myself not to run back to the safety of the living room. I know, in reality, it isn’t any safer, but there are no windows in the living space, and something about that comforts me.

During the day, we get all the light we need through the skylight that runs across the roof.

Vin’s favorite feature of the house was the bathtub with the window.

The skylight is mine, now. On rainy days I can curl up beneath it and pretend that nothing exists outside of me.

I can pretend that I’m just napping on the couch after a long day, and that it’s just a matter of time until Vin gets home and wraps his body around mine.

On the sunny days, I pretend I’m okay. I pretend that I can feel the sun on my skin or smell the scent of the flowers in the garden. I pretend that my heart isn’t as broken as my body, that I’ve learned from my grief and that it has shaped me into a better person.

But I can’t pretend enough to make it real, because Vin never comes home, and I never feel warm or whole.

So, I fake it.

I had no choice when they locked me up and tied me down, forced cocktails of pills down my throat and messed with my head. It took me a while to realize that they were breaking me further, shattering my pieces, and if I wanted any chance of being put back together, I had to do it myself.

And if I couldn’t, then I’d just have to fake it.

I may be stupid, but not so stupid that I don’t learn from my mistakes.

My nerves are shot, but I don’t want to take a pill.

They make me tired, and that’s the last thing I want right now.

I’m not about to drug myself up and make myself easy prey if the creeper comes back.

So, I reach into the fridge and pull out a full bottle of wine, not bothering with a glass, and carry it by the neck into the living room.

I nestle into the couch and wrap myself in the heavy blanket I leave there. I haven’t washed it in a year, and some people would say that’s gross, but it smells like him. It smells like our last night before the world fell out from under my feet, and I’ll die before I toss it in the washer.

It doesn’t matter, though. Nobody comes to my house. I don’t want people here.

I loved to entertain, once upon a time. When we bought the place, we threw a big block party and met all of the neighbors.

Marissa surprised me with an engagement party after Vin had popped the question, stuffing our friends into the kitchen so that the minute I flicked the light on, I was surrounded by the people I loved.

My shower was supposed to take place here, too.

“Easier to get everything home,” I’d told Vin.

Those days are over, and it’s probably for the best. Nobody wants to be here as much as I don’t want them here.

They tiptoe around, scared to touch anything, scared to sit or open the fridge.

They walk on eggshells like Vin’s ghost is going to materialize and start harassing them.

Most days, I wish he would. At least then I wouldn’t be so goddamn lonely.

The TV flickers to life with the press of a button, but I don’t flip through the stations to find something worthy of my attention.

I just open my laptop and take the first swig from my bottle as it boots up, grateful that I’ve never developed a taste for the finer things.

At least the cheap shit comes with twist tops, which means I can drink from the bottle and set it back down without spilling wine everywhere.

When my computer finally flickers to its final phase of life, it returns to the article I was working on last.

I spent months without answers, being told I was too fragile to talk about what had happened.

And when I finally proved myself to be capable of discussing it without breaking down, I was told that there were still no answers.

I’d driven to Tony’s every single day for three months, demanding answers, asking for any shred of an explanation about what had happened.

I spent another three months calling Detective Fremont several times a week, begging for updates just to be shot down because nothing new had come up.

I chased justice for the better part of a year and had just about given up on ever finding it when the first whisper of possibility came out of Tony’s mouth.

He said it would take months, maybe even years to prove it was him. He told me that there were no suspects, and the only person of interest was just that. It was in the same breath that he told me some people suspected that I’d done it all, that I killed the man I loved.

He was quick to tell me that was why it felt like the case had stalled— he knew it wasn’t me, but the detectives weren’t entirely convinced.

He told me they wouldn’t look elsewhere, but that he had an idea of who it could be.

Detective Fremont has never outright told me I’m a suspect, but he’s never told me that I’m innocent, either.

I stopped visiting Tony after that and threw myself into my work…

until my work crossed into my reality in a wild collision when Aaron assigned Victoria to an article about the Evergreen Industries Charity Gala.

The name didn’t mean anything to me until I’d heard it slip out of Tony’s mouth the first time.

So, when I heard it again as we gathered around the boardroom in our weekly huddle, it felt like kismet.

I’d volunteered to take the assignment and started digging into him until I was obsessed.

I finished the article in time for Christmas, but it never ran. It just ended up in a pile on Aaron’s desk.

This time, I didn’t wait for his approval. I slipped my follow-up in with the rest of today’s pieces. Luc ran them without looking through them, same as he always did, and my hit piece on Declan Evers went live.

It hasn’t been out long, which is probably the only reason Aaron hasn’t called to terminate me.

In all of the stress of the day, I’d almost forgotten that it went live today.

I’d almost forgotten the reason I was so rattled when I got home was because after months of digging into him, I ran into him in real life.

What kind of idiot doesn’t put two and two together?

I press my hand over my mouth as I stare at the headshot I left open when I closed my computer last.

In person, his aura is dark. It steals past my bones, seeping into my soul and ensnaring it.

The photographer must have edited his photo to get him to appear less sinister, because on my computer, he doesn’t look terribly frightening.

In the picture with that handsome, rugged face and square jaw, he’s the persona of a former quarterback who got a job at his daddy’s business and worked his way into the Fortune 500.

In person, there was nothing behind his eyes.

But there’s no mistaking it.

Those are the eyes that were glued to me in the bath.

The man who stood outside my window, who pleasured himself to me masturbating to try and relieve stress, is Declan Evers.