Page 94 of Poisoned Promise
He would never harm Dove.
But as much as the anger inside of me threatens to boil over, I also know Dove.
She wouldn’t lie about something like this and from the exhausted, defeated look that washes over her bruised face, I fear she’s telling the absolute truth.
It’s bad enough seeing her so injured and for a few minutes, it satisfied the rage inside me. That rage is quickly morphing into something else, something that was simmering underneath my anger the entire time.
Guilt.
“It’s the truth.” Dove’s bruised lips seem to move ahead of the words reaching my ears. “I found out I was pregnant. You were out of the city and Toph was with you. Nico was the only person I had who I could trust.” Her brows twitch. “Who I thought I could trust. So I reached out to him and he took me to a clinic to see if my test was real. And after a while, the doctor confirmed it. I was pregnant. And then—.” Her words catch in her throat and Dove erupts into rough, dry coughs that snap me out of the odd trance I’m caught in.
“Water,” I bark at the door, turning away from Dove. “Bring me water!”
“But—,” starts the voice on the other side of the door.
“Don’t push me. Bring me some fucking water!”
Footsteps scramble outside the door and hushed voices snap back and forth.
I turn back to Dove and my heart clenches. She’s struggling to catch her breath between each cough, as if the action itself is making it worse.
A ragged gasp rips past her bruised lips, then the door opens and a bottle of water is thrust into my hands.
I crack it open and take a sip just in case someone outside has plans to silence her before I get my answers.
Tasting nothing, it’s worth the risk so I hand it to her and our eyes meet when she seals her dry lips around the neck and drinks.
She keeps drinking.
Mouthful after mouthful until the bottle crackles as it hollows out, and she nearly drains the entire thing.
She lifts her mouth off it with a gasp and pants openly, then she tosses the almost finished bottle at my feet and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist.
Then she resumes without needing any prompting. “He got angry,” she says with a much clearer, stronger voice. “Really angry. We drove back to your place and at first I thought he was worried for me but he kept telling me over and over that I was going to take you away from him and he didn’t like it. It turned into an argument and he hit me. I was so shocked that I let him.” Her voice wobbles even as her gaze is unwavering. “He told me I owed him for always keeping us a secret. Said it was hard on him.”
Nico did joke once or twice that I owed him for protecting our secret and I agreed with him.
He covered for me more than once and allowed me to use him as an excuse any time someone pried too deeply about where I was spending my time.
But this? This doesn’t sound like him at all.
“He said he was going to use me the same way you did and that he’d more than earned it. That’s all I was going to be good for anyway. And he hit me again and then he was on top of me, tearing at my clothes and shove—.” She hesitates, her voice thin and quiet. “He shoved his hands up my skirt and I was frozen. Everything I’d ever learned, everything I knew to take on men twice the size of him and I froze. I wasterrified. He pulled down my underwear and then I punched him. And I kicked him so hard I hoped his balls burst from how he was screaming. And then I ran.”
Tears suddenly roll down Dove’s cheeks but she doesn’t wipe them away. She doesn’t even flinch, as if she has no idea they’re even there.
“And then a couple of days later, I hunted him down and looked him in the eye when I killed him and I don’t regret it. I would do it again in a heartbeat becauseno onegets to make me feel like that. No one gets to hurt me like that and walk away.”
Every word from her is strong in her conviction, every sentence dripping in truth.
She doesn’t blink, she doesn’t look away and from the best of my understanding, she doesn’t lie.
Not that it makes any more sense in my head.
The Nico she knew, the one who would do something so fucking disgusting, is not the Nico I knew and trying to marry them both in my mind feels like an insult to his memory.
But more than that, one single detail stands out like a beacon, one detail that makes Dove’s story undeniably true even if I can’t wrap my head around my brother acting in such a way.
“You were pregnant?”
