When the Glass Breaks

CHAPTER 6

I sat back down. I finished the soup. He drank his coffee and did not look at me and somehow managed to make ignoring me feel like the most pointed thing he had done all afternoon.

I set the spoon down for the final time, stood, and picked up my bag.

"Finished," I announced.

"I can see that."

"Goodbye, Mr. DeLuca."

He said nothing. He looked up at me, and there it was again. That look. Something specific and searching that I didn't have a name for, that felt less like a man seeing a stranger and more like a man seeing something he recognized from a very long way away.

It lasted one second.

Then it was gone, and he was just a dangerous man in a good suit sitting at his table, and I was just a woman who had stolen his chair for four minutes and refused to be sorry about it.

I left.

Behind me, I heard the waiter reappear with fresh energy.

And from further back, quiet enough that I almost missed it, one of the men by the door murmuring something in low disbelief.

I didn't catch the words.

But I heard DeLuca response, even quieter.

"I know," he said.

Outside, the afternoon was bright and completely indifferent to everything that had just happened.

I started walking.

My brain was already back on Ethan. On the Titan Group meeting. Bella is standing in a boardroom right now charming a table full of executives with her enormous competence and her complete lack of a formal title. On everything I needed to do and plan and dismantle before this life ran away from me again.

My phone rang.

Ethan.

I stared at his name on the screen for one full second.

Then I answered.

"Where are you?" His voice came out sharp and cold, stripped of every warm performance he usually layered over it. "The Titan Group meeting started twenty minutes ago. I told you specifically…"

"Bella is handling it," I said.

"Bella is an assistant coordinator, Amanda. She is not equipped to…"

"Bella is fine," I said. "She's more than fine."

"That is not your decision to make." His voice dropped lower. The particular low that I now recognize. Not softness. The thing underneath it. "You will get back here in the next ten minutes or I swear to you…"

I ended the call.

I stood on the pavement.

And then, without permission, without warning, without any dignity whatsoever, my legs gave out.

Not dramatically. I didn't fall. I sort of folded, sliding down until I was sitting on the kerb in my fitted black skirt and my bold red lipstick, with my expensive heels on the concrete and my face in my hands.

And I cried.

Not the careful, suppressed tears from the bathroom. Real crying. The kind that builds in your chest and comes out ugly and doesn't care who sees. The kind you have when you've been holding something for too long and the container finally gives.

I cried for my mother, who was alive and making aggressive coffee and had absolutely no idea what was coming.

I cried for my father, who handed me water and looked at me with that gentle, patient face and had no idea I had buried him.

I cried for eight years of a life I had built on a lie, dismantled by a man who had decided, as a bet, to see if he could break me.

I cried because even knowing all of it, even hating him, my body had still gone warm when he held me in his office this morning.

I cried because I was twenty-two years old again and I was alone on a kerb and I had no idea how to do this.

The footsteps came from behind me.

I didn't register them properly. I was too far inside my own wreckage. I assumed pedestrians. I assumed someone stepping around me with the mild urban discomfort of encountering emotion in a public space.

The first blow came across the back of my head.

White and sudden.

The second came before I could process the first.

And then the pavement rushed up to meet me, and the city noise went muffled and strange, and darkness arrived not dramatically but simply, like a light someone had decided to switch off.

I came back to consciousness slowly.

The way you surface from very deep water. Aware of pressure first, then weight, then the gradual, terrible return of sensation.

The ceiling above me was unfamiliar. Stone, or something close to it. High. A light somewhere to the left, warm and low.

I blinked.

Then I tried to move.

Pain answered immediately. A full-body protest so thorough and complete that I went still again before I had even lifted an inch.

I was on a surface. A bed. Something firm. Something that was not the pavement.

I stared at the ceiling and took inventory the way my body would allow.

Arms. Present. Aching.

Legs. Present. Worse.

Head. Pounding with a slow, tidal persistence that suggested something had hit it. Hard. More than once.

I turned my head to the right.

And then I stopped breathing.

My hands were in my lap.

Both of them.

Stained dark to the wrist.

I stared at them.

The colour was unmistakable. The smell reached me a second later. Iron and copper, ancient and terrible.

Blood.

Not a little blood. Not a cut, not a scrape.

Blood.

I looked down at myself.

My white blouse was soaked through. My skirt. My arms. The front of me, the side of me, the particular thoroughness of it suggesting not an accident but a quantity.

My brain offered three thoughts in rapid, terrified succession.

Whose blood is this.

What happened.

Why don't I remember.

I tried to recall. After the pavement. After the blow. After the darkness.

Nothing.

A gap where memory should have been. Clean-edged, total, as if someone had simply removed the hours and left the space behind them empty.

I looked at my hands again.

They were not shaking.

That was the part that frightened me most.

In the quiet of the unfamiliar room, with blood drying on my skin and hours missing from my mind, my hands were completely, perfectly still.

Like they had done whatever they had done.

And had no regrets about it at all.

“Crazy b***h! What have you done?’