Chapter 142: Booking a therapist

Ivy

"It doesn’t matter," he said quietly. "I assume you do not need to be told what to do. You were smart enough to pull this off, after all."

He stepped even closer, his large hands reaching forward before he caught himself, and they fell limply to his sides. "If I see you within six meters of me and my brothers, hell, if you so much as breathe in their direction, Miss Harpley..."

"No," I breathed. "No, please. Gideon, please..."

"It won’t go this pretty. I never let traitors leave unscathed."

Then he turned and walked toward the door.

"Get your things and leave. We will be pressing charges," he murmured without looking back.

"And tell your dear father I’m coming for his head." His voice was low and deadly. "And I won’t rest until I have it on a pike."

And then he was gone.

Kai followed, but not before shooting me a look that was half hurt and half anger. Roman was the last.

He stood there staring at me, his jaw tight and his hands clenched at his sides. For a moment, just a moment, I thought he might say something soft that would make this easier.

But he only shook his head. "Don’t ever show up in front of me. Ever."

And then he was gone too.

I stood in the middle of the living room, surrounded by my ripped sweater, my torn jeans and my heart in pieces on the floor.

The tears came in a flood, a torrent, a tsunami I couldn’t hold back. I sank onto the couch, pulled my knees to my chest and sobbed.

This was it. This was what I had been afraid of, the one thing I had been running from, and it was worse, so much worse than I had imagined.

What do I do now? I sobbed harder into my palms. How was I supposed to never see them again?

I had lied, and lied, and lied. I had done the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do.

I had fallen in love with them.

I don’t know how long I sat there. It was long enough for the tears to dry and the sobs to dial down into hiccups, and long enough for my body to go cold in nothing but my panties.

Eventually, I forced myself up.

My legs were shaky and my chest ached as if someone had cracked it open with a hammer. I walked to my room on autopilot, though it wasn’t exactly my room anymore, was it?

I packed slowly. There wasn’t much, because I had never really moved in. I just wanted something to wear, since my clothes were ripped.

The maid uniform glared up at me, haunting me and mocking me. I had told every sort of lie to keep this uniform, and it was pretty much the only thing available to wear.

How ironic. How... More tears leaked down the corners of my eyes. I had to get out of here. I changed into the uniform and walked down the hallway. I passed the library where Gideon had held me through the storm, where he had played checkers with me, where he had looked at me like... I had to stop.

I pressed my hand to the doorframe, then pushed away and clamped a hand over my mouth to hold back the sobs as I raced out the front door.

The night air hit me straight in the face. I was shaking, partly from the cold but mostly from everything else. I tried to wipe my eyes, but it was useless. The tears kept spilling down my cheeks faster than I could catch them, and my breath came out in ragged, uneven gasps that fogged in the air.

I stumbled out the gate, fumbled for my phone with numb fingers and hailed a cab.

The cab took ten minutes to arrive, but it felt like ten years. A part of me kept hoping they would call me back, but who was I kidding?

Once I got to my hotel room, I broke down all over again.

The next day, I was still buried in bed, clutching the teddy bear Kai gave me to my chest, too tired to get up. Sometime past noon, my thumb brushed something hard under the fur near its left eye. I sat up and turned the bear toward the window, and there it was, a pinprick of black glass that caught the light.

The camera. I had known about it since the night he made me spread my legs for it, and I had still been holding it like a lifeline. I pulled at the stitching with my nails until the seam split, dug out the tiny battery and the lens, and stared at them in my palm.

Every night I had slept with this, he could have been watching. I hurled the bear across the room, and it hit the wall and slid to the floor with its stuffing showing. Then I started crying again.

My phone rang over and over, with calls from Father and Jake and, heck, even Angel, of all people. That annoying bastard had the guts to call me. I ignored them all and let them go to voicemail until a text from my father came through.

Father: Pick up the phone, Harper. If you don’t, what you did fourteen years ago will come to light.

I sat up so fast my head spun. What? No way he would! I grabbed my phone and called him back.

"Father, what do you mean? Why would you... why did you send me that?"

"Ah." He sounded so unbothered, as if he hadn’t just dropped a bomb on me. "So you finally decided to pick up. You sound terrible, Harper. Have you been crying?"

"Yes, I’ve been crying," I grumbled, too tired to pander to him. "What do you mean, what I did years ago? What are you going to do, Father?"

"Nothing. Yet," he replied. "But you’ve been ignoring me. I got arrested, Harper. Arrested. And you didn’t even bother to come and check on your poor father. So I had to find a way to draw you out. It seems spending time with those fools has been getting to your head. Have they finally thrown you out?"

I blinked rapidly. "What... how did you know?"

"Who do you think told Jake to send that picture to that model? She was sniffing around, wanting to find your identity. I figured teaching you a little lesson would remind you of who is truly on your side."

My stomach grew queasy. "She would have found out anyway," he went on, as if explaining a spreadsheet.

"Better that the Knights learn it when I choose, and from a source that makes you look like what you are, a girl with nowhere else to go. My accounts are frozen, Harper, and my investors are leaving. I need my heir at the company and at my side, not warming a bed in their house. You’ll come back to me now because there is nowhere else for you to go."

He did this. My father had exposed me. It would have been almost hilarious if I weren’t in so much pain and disbelief.

Why? Why did he always do things like this to me? He had always gotten rid of my friends back in high school and college, reminding me he was my only ally.

He had made me believe I was barren and had even had his friend plant an IUD inside me. Was my father really my ally?

How long? How long has my father been pulling the strings while I danced around blindly like a puppet?

"What do you want from me, Dad?" My voice cracked. "I’m doing everything for you.

Everything. I gave up my life and my marriage. I gave up everything. What more do you want?"

"I don’t want much. I just need you to come back to work. What matters is protecting the company. And it seems that spreading your legs for those men has made you forget what’s important."

I opened my mouth to argue, but he kept going.

"Those men will not hesitate to kill me. Or you. If it’s to get what they want. You think they’re your friends? You think they care about you? They’re Knights. They’re devils. And they will destroy us both if we give them the chance."

The line clicked dead. I stood there with the phone pressed to my ear, staring at the wall.

They’re devils.

But they weren’t. Kai had screamed at me, and Gideon had said terrible things in that cold voice, but none of them had struck me. Roman had gripped my throat and my hair, and yet his hand shook the whole time, and he had stopped the moment I said you know.

None of them had done to me what they would surely have done to others who betrayed them. I had hurt them, and they had still held back.

The devil was someone else and it took me so long to peel the mask off my eyes but now it was over. I dialed a number with shaky fingers and took a deep breath.

"Adele, hi. Sorry to disturb you. Do you know a good therapist? I need help remembering somethings that happened when I was a child."