Total pages in book: 132
Estimated words: 125465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 627(@200wpm)___ 502(@250wpm)___ 418(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 627(@200wpm)___ 502(@250wpm)___ 418(@300wpm)
If he had a head injury or something like that, it would affect him this way, right?
I try to shift my weight a little to make myself more comfortable, and I suck in a pained gasp. “My shoulder hurts,” I grunt, trying hard not to put any pressure on it. “It’s so sore. It stings.”
“That was the tracker.”
He says it like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like he’s commenting on the weather outside. “The what?”
“The tracking device that was implanted in your shoulder years ago. I took it out.” He raises another spoonful of soup to my lips. “Come on. Open up.”
I open my mouth if only to keep hot soup from spilling across my chest. I don’t even taste it anymore. “There was a tracking device in my shoulder?”
“Close to your shoulder blade, yeah. You were at the dentist, getting worked on, and that’s when your father had it put in.”
“He was tracking me.”
“I’m afraid so.”
While most of me doesn’t want to believe it, a very small but insistent part of me does. If anything, it makes too much sense. The way he always seemed to know where I was. I could never pull anything over on him. This was more than a case of having eyes in the back of his head and bodyguards everywhere.
Righteous indignation bubbles in my chest, forcing its way up my throat. “He didn’t trust me, so he had a tracking device implanted without me knowing it.”
“It’s not about trust. He thought he was protecting you.” If I wasn’t so angry about this, I would probably be more curious about how Ren is standing up for my father. Almost like he would have done the same.
“Protecting me?” I blurt out, almost breathless from the betrayal. “He thought he had to protect me? When Quinton’s the one who went missing twice? I’m the one who gets a tracker implanted in my shoulder? What the hell?”
For the first time since I found him in the garden, he smiles, and it’s almost like looking at the Ren I thought I knew. The Ren I’ve loved for so long.
“And you were in a hurry to get back to them,” he says, instantly killing the moment. It’s the bitterness in his voice, fairly dripping from it. This man has enough resentment to choke a horse. “Don’t worry. I took it out of you. He can’t control you anymore.”
“But why? Why did you do it? What made you hurt my family—your family?” I correct since that’s who they are. We’re family. Or we were.
My questions bring a curtain down between us, and he withdraws again, this time breaking off a piece of bread and putting it in my mouth. No answers. He won’t acknowledge my question.
No, no, I can’t have that. I can’t have him pull away again. There must be a way to get through to him, to get him talking to me. Not only because I’m so hungry for him in my soul, either. He’s damn creepy when he goes silent. Eerie.
“I made a mistake back at MIT.”
His brows lift, but he says nothing, stirring the soup and sending steam into the air to mix with the scent of the wood that surrounds us. It would feel homey and charming under different circumstances.
“I broke my promise,” I continue, forcing the words out even though my heart’s pounding, and I feel like I’m about to be sick. But if anything’s going to get through to him, it’ll be this. Because he still cares about me. He’s proven it. “I let somebody else touch me at a party. A stranger who wore a mask. He fingered me. I don’t know; I guess I tried to believe it was you. I needed to believe it after missing you so much for so long. But it clearly wasn’t, and I’ve regretted it every day since.”
That has to do it, right? It has to stir him out of this near catatonia. He’ll get mad, sure, but he’ll be real.
It’ll be him, finally, fighting with me. For me.
He inhales deeply through his nose, then lets it out slowly while he stares down at the bits of carrots and peas floating in the tomato broth. What’s he thinking? What’s he going to do?
What he does when he finally lifts his gaze is the last thing I expected.
He smiles.
He might as well have hit me. No, a punch in the face would have felt more normal after what I just admitted. That, I could make sense of.
But a smile? One that never reaches those flat eyes of his?
“As if I would ever let someone else touch you,” he whispers, the smile still plastered on his face.
The truth hits me like a ton of bricks.
Oh my god.
It was him.
He was stalking me around campus.
I was right—but it doesn’t make me feel better.