Page 135 of Discretion at Its Finest
And something inside me snapped. The phone flew out of my hand before I even realized I’d thrown it. It smashed against the concrete, skidding into the shadows, pieces scattering.
“Fuck!”
The shout ricocheted off metal beams and empty walls. I pressed both palms to my face, trying to breathe through the shaking in my chest, trying to shove down the storm ripping through me.
It was easier when she was a memory and I could pretend she hadn’t chosen a life over her children… over us. It was easier when she was dead. Andshe wasfucking dead to me.
But now—
Now she was calling me as if she still had the fucking right.
Like she remembered I existed and finally wanted me. But I wanted nothing, absolutely nothing to do with her.
I braced both hands on my knees, gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come, vision blurring in and out, my head pounding, my eyes growing heavy as my chest stayed tight.
A shadow cast over me, army boots coming into my line of sight as the figure stood watching silently.
I ignored it as I turned my face away, slapping my cheek hard enough to sting, anything to keep myself tethered.
He isn’t real.
He isn’t real.
He isn’t fucking real.
His voice flickered behind me, just a whisper, another hallucination, my trauma playing its favorite game. But I didn’t look at him. “You know she didn’t mean to leave.”
A tremor rolled down my spine. I squeezed my eyes shut.No. Not tonight. Not fucking tonight.
My breath came too fast, too shallow.
“Shut up,” I muttered to the empty air, my eyes searching immediately for the pills I’d been prescribed.I couldn’t find them.
But he kept talking anyway; he always did. Because my head was a torture house of buried corpses and old guilt that never decomposed.
“You know she didn’t mean it,” he murmured. “She loves you, man. She always did.”
My jaw clenched until it hurt, my hands rummaging through my desk drawers as he followed me.Why couldn’t I fucking find them?
“Shut up.”
“She came back,” he went on softly. “And you survived. We both did—”
Finally they came into sight and I ripped open the cap, forcing the dry tablets down my throat. “You. Didn’t.” The words ripped out of me. “You fucking didn’t.”
Silence followed and my breathing filled the air, my heartbeat ringing in my ears. “I didn’t save you,” I whispered. “I didn’t save any of us.”
Then, mercifully, the mental weight of my mind lifted and he was gone. I sagged forward, forearms braced on my desk, body shaking as relief and grief twisted together inside me before I collapsed to the ground, pills spilling beside me. I lay on my back, hand finding my forehead as I forced myself to breathe.
This was why Brielle worried.
Why she hovered so close and why Killian kept me on a leash made of patience and caution.
Because I was a cracked mirror pretending not to be shattered—and God… I hated being broken.
Chapter fifty-one
Reid
