Page 12 of Promise of Destruction (Destruction & Vengeance Duet #1)

twelve

Soren

I fall asleep on the 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 make myself smaller, 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 the posts 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 know the 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 steal everything that 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 they intend to 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 I did try to cut her out of me.

No.

I sit up, brushing my hair off my face. The sky is lightening into the fusion of cotton candy colors that makes me sick, and it’s close enough to morning.

I muster the courage to walk to the bathroom, turning every light on in my path, electric bill be damned, and force myself to look at the window. The first rays of the sun’s light are starting to slip between the slats, brightening the room, and it gives me enough peace to get closer.

But of course, there’s no one there.

Maybe there never was at all.

I don’t hear her words—covering my ears with my hands won’t keep her from terrorizing me—but if I did, I think she’d say everything in a sing-song voice, taunting me with her silky peppiness as much as she does with the words she chooses so deliberately.

No.

He was there, standing outside my window.

He watched me. He came on my wall.

Or maybe you imagined the whole thing…

I might consider that possibility if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not the only witness. Tony saw it.

Typically, I have no qualms about walking through my own house naked, but after last night’s events—real or imagined—I’m not feeling so bold, so I turn the water on and wrap a towel around myself while I go set a pot of coffee and down one of the little yellow pills that’s supposed to shut up the bitch in my head.

By the time I’m stepping out of the shower, I realize I fucked up and lost track of time.

I’m going to be late, and I still have to stop for coffee because the minute I open the fridge I remember I didn’t order any creamer.

I do my best to doctor it up, mixing in heavy cream that’s a few days out of date and some caramel syrup that has been crusted over in disuse, but all that accomplishes is making me later…

and creating a pretty swirl as it flows into the drain because it’s foul.

If there’s one thing I’m grateful for this past year, beyond Marissa and Khan and Tony, without whom I’d certainly have already killed myself with every measure of finality, it’s Aaron.

Not only does he look the other way when I’m habitually late, he still hasn’t called to give me hell about slipping the hit piece in with yesterday’s running’s, which means he is either so mad he will ream me out in person, or he doesn’t care that I went behind his back and jeopardized his job.

That’s why the least I can do is pick up his coffee—black with a side of sugar and cream—and try not to let it cover my car interior as I pull too quickly into the parking garage and stop short when I see a shiny, expensive looking car in the spot where I usually park.

Aaron offered me his parking spot when I first started.

They weren’t assigned, but he’d been there long enough that nobody tried to take it if he wasn’t the first one there in the morning.

When he noticed that I was consistently staying late despite his insistence that I not overwork myself, he’d told me I at least had to park closer to the elevator, and subsequently, the camera.

It’s safer, he’d insisted when he gave me the space.

Though I was embarrassed to accept his offer at first, I’m grateful for it every night that I walk alone to my car through the empty garage.

Moving on when my husband’s murderer is still out there, when they could come back to finish me off, sets me on edge.

I always feel like someone is watching me these days.

The car that stole my parking spot looks too fancy to belong to Aaron, unless he got a hefty raise, so I come to the conclusion that we must have company from the upper echelons of the media industry.

The possibility is already annoying in and of itself, but when you add in the fact I have to walk six rows up in heels, balancing Aaron’s coffee atop my own, I’m irritable.

I’m so preoccupied with making sure I don’t trip and splash coffee all over or worse, drop my computer out from under my arm, that I don’t realize something is off until I push the door open with my shoulder and stop at Emily’s desk to readjust and say good morning.

But when I look up from behind the paper cup of coffee, it’s not Emily standing there.

With her hair in a sleek, shiny blonde ponytail that doesn’t allow even a single hair to be out of place, the woman standing there looks like she’s been plucked off the front page of a high fashion magazine, complete with a bone structure that simply screams: Why yes, I know I’m a fabulous bitch.

Her ice cold eyes don’t help matters, either.

“Oh,” I swallow my surprise. Her gaze on me is unsettling, and it takes me a moment to recover, tucking my hair behind my ear so that I can get an unobstructed view of her. “Are you filling in for Emily? Is she sick?”

“I’m not filling in .” The bitch snaps, and her accent is decidedly too posh to be from anywhere around here. I’d say she’s somewhere from the East Coast, based on that accent alone. “This is my desk now. Move along.”

I wait a second to see if she’s joking, but when her face stays every bit as stoic, I tuck my laptop deeper into the crook of my arm and balance the coffees again until I reach my desk.

But when I set my coffee down, I notice that everything is gone. All of my personal belongings have disappeared, and in their place are somebody else’s possessions. A framed picture of a happy couple, a smaller one of a black lab, a bobble head of some popular TV show figurine.

Maybe you don’t work here. Maybe you never worked here at all.

No.

The pill was supposed to put her to sleep. Why is this bitch in my head right now when I’m trying to act like I have my life together?

What the fuck is going on?

Tears threaten to fall as my face turns hot, and the woman from the framed photo approaches me with an equal mixture of concern and irritation that’s honestly pretty impressive. I spin around, looking for anything familiar, an anchor that will assure me I am not insane, that I am in control.

But when my eyes fall on the door, I realize the white letters that spelled out The Covington Tribune , complete with the lopsided e at the end, have been replaced by a fancy etching in the glass.

I don’t even notice all the eyes on me as I cross the room, back the way I came, and open the door so that I can run my hand over the letters that have been etched into the glass there.

I just left this office hours ago, and I’d shaken my head for the umpteenth time about the fact that nobody cared to re-order the stencil and fix the skewed letters.

But now the name that’s been etched into the door with precision looks like it’s been there the whole time.

The Covington Herald

And underneath it, in smaller script— Blackstone Industries & Evergreen Enterprises.

I think I may be sick.

The world around me goes staticky, and I think I’m about to faint.

It’s like the man behind me senses it, because before my limbs go entirely useless, he steps behind me, his body forming a solid wall that keeps me upright.

“Soren.”

I look up to see Luc standing on the other side of the glass.

He already thinks I’m certifiable, and I think that only grows as I sigh in obvious relief at the sight of him.

He fixes me with a long glance up and down before looking over my shoulder and then turning away, shaking his head on his way back to his office.

It takes me a moment for the world to settle, but when it does, I realize how ridiculous I must look. I turn, my hand pressed against my chest so that I can feel the rhythm of my heart slowing back to a normal pace.

But it doesn’t last long, because as soon as I turn, I find myself face-to-face with Declan Evers himself.