“How?” I croak, blinking rapidly, mentally willing myself to stay present and alert but I’m slowly losing the battle. That contract was supposed to stay under wraps until he fulfilled his side of the bargain—which he was never going to do anyway.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what you did today, Mia,” Shane mocks. “But hey, I’m just fucking glad your dearest daddy called us back.”
Called them back? Could it be that the Matthews were one of the bidders?
“Oh God,” I croak, my teeth beginning to chatter as a new wave of pain slams into me. My head starts pounding with renewed vigor. It feels like someone set my face on fire where Sean slapped me.
My lower body is screaming in agony and I realize what I was feeling when I woke in the freezer is nothing compared to this and the drug in my veins.
I’ve never experienced hypothermia before, or having my body begin to thaw in a large room with a cold windy breeze. Everything hurts, and nothing is working as it should.
I can feel my lungs working double time as I fight to catch my breath, but it doesn’t help. It’s as if my body is shutting down slowly but painfully and my heart…well, that’s failing too.
“She’s having a panic attack, give her space to breathe,” that same female voice from before says. I can’t even move to look at who it is, but I can still hear her oh so familiar voice which I still can’t place. Why is that?
“Nah, I think the ice Queen looks fucking great just like this, with her perky little nipples on display. Pathetic. Exposed. Small. Beaten down and at my fucking mercy because Palos Verdes is my fucking town and it’s high time those bastards know it!”
“She needs to get warm, or do you want her to die of hypothermia?” she questions, her voice high pitched and so familiar, but all I can think, all I know is that my father did this to me.
“She needs to remember how she got into this to begin with,” someone says.
“But—”
“Do you want a fucking turn in that freezer, bitch?” Sean threatens the girl. I guess she shakes her head or something because Sean says, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Now shut your fucking mouth. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“Are you in pain, Ice Queen?” he says with a laugh, enjoying my distress.
“I doubt it, Sean,” Shane says as he comes to sit on the other side of the springy, old bed. “She doesn’t feel pain. Or feelings in general, isn’t that right?”
Tears of frustration and silent horror at what my father did fall down my cheeks and I try to recall what happened this morning.
This morning…
“You know, why don’t you cool off while you think, huh?”
“No!”
“Put her stupid, naïve ass back in the freezer. We have shit to take care off.”
Before I can start fighting, I feel another pinprick on my arm. Almost immediately, darkness claims me.
This time, I go in fighting.
Chapter Five
Mia
Earlier that morning
Something’s going to go terribly wrong today.
It’s the first day of senior year and I’m a mess in more ways than anyone can handle. Everything is murky, dark and makes zero sense but the feeling of dread in my bones? It doesn’t seem to be lifting anytime soon.
Maybe it’s because the past couple of weeks have been shit, or maybe because there’s so much riding on this day, but I don’t feel so good.
It’s been two long, horrible, torturous weeks.
Two weeks since Julian held me in his warm embrace on that beach in Europe and declared his love for me that I felt in my soul, warming all my frozen parts and mending all the pieces of my heart that I thought would be forever lost.
Two weeks since I started to feel like everything was going to be all right and now, two weeks later here we are.
I try shaking off the heavy melancholy feeling that has settled in my gut as I stare at my reflection in the mirror, but the feeling only settles in deeper. I can barely recognize the girl in the mirror. She looks like a racoon going through a serious accidental meth withdrawal. There are bags under my red-shot eyes.
Julian believes I sided with my father to set him up and destroy his future and me, I’m broken over that. How could he believe the lies and not me, after everything we’ve been through already?
I haven’t forgotten the look on his handsome, perfectly chiseled from the finest marble, god-like face the moment he decided to dismiss me and hate me all over again.
I’ve been trying to piece everything that happened from the day my fractured family moved into the Fitzgerald mansion, but nothing makes sense. Not in the freaking slightest.
All I know is, I’m playing in a high-stakes game with players so cunning and ruthless they don’t mind sacrificing their own children.
I yank my perfectly ironed Clintwood senior long-sleeved shirt from the hanger with hostility I can’t restrain and put it on, covering the shameful cuts on my wrists and arms.
I feel empty.
I feel crashed and hopeless but still, I have to go on like nothing happened, like the world isn’t currently attacking me. On social media, the news, everywhere I look, my face and Julian’s are everywhere. Everyone has something to say apparently.
But the thing about my current dilemma is it’s gone from worse to freaking catastrophe in a span of days and in all that shit, I’m livid, but I can’t show that to anyone but myself because of the deal I made with Courtney and my father.
A deal that can go sideways if I so much as make a move wrong.
But that doesn’t lessen the chaos in my heart and in my mind.
I’m the villain and enemy in this latest chapter of an unending nightmare, all thanks to my father.
But most of all, I hate that I’m all alone in this. But to be fair, what the fuck did I expect?
“Knock, knock,” my previous aunt—who’s actually my biological mother and trying desperately to assume the role, especially now that Nancy is six-feet under—says as she taps the door to my walk-in closet, an uncertain look in her eyes. “May I come in?”
I see her shifting on her feet nervously through the large floor-ceiling length mirrors of my old walk-in closet, the one I grew up playing dress up in and love to hide from Nancy when she banned me from reading pretty steamy novels that’s he said I was too young to understand. Nancy… God, I miss her so freaking much.
But now, she’s just another gaping hole in my chest and it doesn’t help that her sister and I are back in my childhood home which has a lot of fucking untold history roaming the halls.
“Sure,” I murmur, watching her with flat eyes.
I’m not comfortable with her seeing the depths of the agony in me or the sadness that has shredded my soul to nothing.
“Good morning, did you sleep well?” Nicky asks softly, carefully, like approaching a wounded animal. “How are you today?”
“I’m fine,” I mutter, pulling my hair into a high ponytail.
For the first time ever, I’m grateful that Clintwood Academy has us wearing some gaudy, drab uniforms. I’ll just blend in with everyone else.
But who am I kidding, everyone will be talking about me, hating me, staring at me. I bet Kristine is happy wherever her pregnant ass is right now.