Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 167
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
Her lips form one word. My name. Rocky. Her eyes glass, and I thumb away silent tears slipping down her cheeks.
She shuts her eyes, too out of it to comprehend anything other than my presence—that I’m right here. The comfort and security of this keeps easing her body against me. Soon, the drugs begin to drag her back under.
Now that Phoebe is being taken care of, my mind travels back to my sister, and my migraine strengthens like a screw drilling halfway into my skull. “What happened to Hailey?” I ask them.
“Oliver and Jake found her on the beach,” Nova explains in a wooden tone that sends a shot of adrenaline into my bloodstream. I can’t relax. “She was protecting Phoebe.”
“She was protecting Phoebe,” I repeat with a similar flat tone, and an iron taste floods my mouth. It takes me a second to realize I just bit my tongue. “Was she assaulted?”
“I don’t know.” Nova pulls at his khaki crewneck like he’s burning up inside. Anger pulses his narrowed eyes, and he cranks down the window to let balmy nighttime air into the car.
Silence eats at me.
At us.
Oliver has one casual hand on the wheel. “Hailey shouldn’t have been in that position. It’s not a role she’s been trained to handle.” He doesn’t bring up her role in conning Trent, since she’s been struggling with it.
Nova scrapes a palm back and forth over his short brown hair. “The three of you barely handle it fucking well. Phoebe dissociates, Rocky has a sensitivity problem—”
“It’s not a problem,” I interject.
“—and you spend three hours organizing the bathroom cabinet, Ol.”
“Coping mechanisms,” Oliver reasons. “That’s what we were taught, Nov. Hailey has none of that when it comes to these situations. If it’d been me or Phoebe or Rocky, we would’ve been able to lead these guys back to the party with promises of a good time that we were never going to deliver.”
Guys? There were guys on the beach. Confirmed.
My brain is on fire. Especially as Nova says, “This wasn’t a job. They weren’t working a fucking job, Oliver.”
I grind my jaw. “It’s Trent,” I chime in. “It’s always fucking Trent.” He’s a malignant growth on this town. We’re just the parasite determined to bring him down.
But I fucked up. Really fucked up. My friendship with Trent was obliterated in one instant tonight. I lost every shred of influence over the eldest Koning. Our plans to push him out of Victoria just became infinitely harder.
All thanks to me.
THIRTY
Rocky
“Just like old times,” Nova mutters tightly as he hooks an IV bag to a coatrack we brought from the yacht’s main saloon to the primary suite, and I cover Phoebe’s legs beneath the comforter.
Like old times. Nashville, our early twenties, the image of a motel, doing this same thing with Nova Graves as I rested his unconscious sister on a bed. Our past strikes me like a flashlight in my eyes. It pierces. Tries to hurt.
I never left her that night. I wouldn’t leave her now. I’m accustomed to doing the same things over and over again. This twisted merry-go-round is a ride we can’t seem to jump off of. We’re falling victim to the same patterns. Same behaviors.
There are moments when I wonder if we like it.
If life would be too mundane without these insane highs and devastating lows, then I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe that life with Phoebe needs to be this painful.
“A time we’re not repeating,” I say more to the room than to Nova, and I mean it. I can’t do this again. I can’t have her in harm’s way again and again.
After I tuck my passed-out girlfriend into bed, I take a seat on the edge beside her waist, and I unlace my Italian leather boots. My muscles can’t unflex. My abs won’t untighten. I’m resting at a perpetual state of pissed-off fury.
Nova is also stewing. About what exactly, I’m unsure, but he’s not bolting out the door. He keeps watch of his sister, gripping the bedpost like he’s forcing himself not to do something rash and stupid. Like hunt down the fucker who slipped her drugs.
There are bigger monsters to stake in the heart than Howie.
I don’t tell him that. Because, again, can’t read his mind. “You can go,” I say, my tone not close to sweet. “I’m staying with her for the rest of the night.”
Nova also stayed in the motel with Phoebe years ago, but some things have changed since then. I need him to acknowledge this. Like right now.
He’s quiet. His jaw muscle twitching.
I pry off my boot, gripping it like he’s gripping the bedpost. “What more do you want for her?” I ask him outright. “I would die for your sister. I would protect her until my last fucking breath. I love her how she wants to be loved. What more is there, Nova? Because that’s all I would want for Hailey.”