Beckham and Penelope were engaged.
Her stomach heaved. Her eyes went blurry, and she couldn’t hear a word the news reporter was saying. All she could see was the fuzzy picture of Beckham and Penny. What the fuck?
“Reyna, come on. Don’t look at that,” Meghan said.
“He’s engaged,” she whispered.
“Let’s get out of here, okay?” Meghan said, using her nurse voice.
“He’s…he’s engaged.”
Reyna wasn’t seeing or hearing a thing. Her world was spinning. She was upside down.
Meghan reached for Reyna’s arm and tugged her toward the entrance. Reyna took one last look at the glowing faces on the screen and then forced herself to turn away. She didn’t know what she was feeling right now. Sick and twisted up in disbelief. But also…angry. Beckham and Penelope were engaged? It wasn’t even possible. She had seen them together at the ball and known that was his cover. She had said in her mind that she was letting him go. But that was before she had escaped and seen all that he had done for her. That he had been planning to get her out all along. But an engagement was a whole other thing. She ground her teeth together and followed the girls to the medical center.
“Look, it’s a trash news network,” Meghan said. “I told you from the start that everything they say is a lie.”
“You think they’re not together?” Reyna asked her pointedly.
Jodie snorted next to her as they finally came to a stop.
“What’s your problem?” Meghan asked.
“I’m just saying that I got a good look at that girl. No one is forcing a man to be with her.”
“Can we just get this over with? I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Great. Thanks for that.” Meghan shook her head at Jodie, who shrugged.
Reyna needed to pull herself together. After everything she had been through and everything she’d endured, she wouldn’t fall apart now. She was finally free. Right now she needed to concentrate on getting better and trying to acclimate.
“You know,” Meghan said as they walked away, “we have a therapist who works here, too. It might help if you two talk about what happened with someone.”
“We don’t want to talk about it,” Jodie cut in.
Reyna wasn’t even upset that Jodie spoke for her.
“I understand,” Meghan said at once. “I was just offering so you knew you had the option.”
Reyna wasn’t about to talk to a therapist about anything. Not about Beckham or Harrington or Roland or the needles or the venom or the prison cell. Or…or B. Revealing what had happened at Visage meant reliving it, and she definitely wasn’t prepared for that.
She’d do better trying to move on and find a new place for herself in Elle. Her brothers had already done it. She might not like their path, but at least they had one. She hadn’t been content in Beckham’s penthouse as a cooped-up doll, and she wouldn’t be useless here, either. After everything she’d gone through, it would be nice to have something to do again.
Reyna sat in an all-too-familiar chair inside a sterile white medical facility. Jodie paced relentlessly around the room like a caged animal. Reyna’s own fear should have spiked at the setting, but the only thing she really felt was numb.
She had been here before. Not this building, of course, but it was set up much the same as the Visage rooms. The chair was less comfortable, straight-backed and forbidding. Harrington wasn’t going to walk through the door, but the equipment was the same. The gentle beeping of the machinery was the same. The sounds and sights and smells… It was all the same.
Meghan trotted around the room as if her two patients weren’t ranging between feral and catatonic. “Let me get the saliva and we’ll be good to go.”
“Venom,” Reyna corrected.
“What?”
“I call it vamp venom.”
“Fitting,” Jodie chimed in.
“Vamp venom it is, then.”
