Clara’s fingers dig into my back, like she’s trying to crawl inside me, and I know, without a doubt, that I don’t want to know what happened. I just want to scoop up my girl and disappear.
RJ puts a hand on Jansen’s arm, breaking his trance, and Jay steps close, placing his palm against her back. “Beautiful?”
She makes a tiny whimper that has my heart cracking in two, then pushes away, just a bit, from my chest.
“I think we need to talk.” She glances over her shoulder at Trips, and if possible, he looks even worse. But he nods and stomps past us, leading us to the living room. He throws his bag on the ground, but stands in front of the TV, not taking his usual seat. And when we get there too, Clara takes it, and none of us say a thing. If she needs the distance, we’re not going to fight her on it.
When Trips doesn’t say anything either, that’s when I know it’s bad. Really bad.
The three of us line up on the couch, like kids getting chewed out by their parents, and Clara just stares at her hands, the color and size of them looking odd. Redder than they should be, with slightly swollen fingers. What the hell happened? They weren’t even gone for a full twenty-four hours.
They both speak at the same time, then after a glance, Trips cedes the floor to Clara. And that’s when I know it’s life altering.
She twists her fingers, then shifts so she’s sitting cross-legged. “Last night didn’t go well,” she starts.
“Beautiful, I need you to get to the point, because I’m freaking out,” Jansen says, honest as only he can be.
She swallows. “Trips’ dad forced us to get engaged. He’s forcing us to get married. He knows what we’ve been up to, complete with pictures, and he’s threatening us all.”
A ringing in my ears accompanies the silence like the echo of a gong.
Trips tosses a ring box on the coffee table, the sound of it hitting like a gunshot in the silence. “And I almost killed Clara last night. She’s going to sugarcoat that shit, but yeah. I almost fucking killed her.”
I can’t process this.
But RJ’s on his feet, circling the table. “Can you explain what you mean by that?” His voice is calm but strange to my ears, something about it not computing in my frozen brain.
Trips stands there, hands clenched, not shifting his weight, like a challenge. “I lost my shit. She followed me. When I came to, she was passed out in the snow, blue and non-responsive.”
RJ takes the challenge, and in a series of moves faster than I can parse, he has Trips pinned on the ground, blood pouring from his nose, his arm twisted behind his back at an angle that should be impossible.
“Stop,” Clara says, a whisper we all turn to, her gaze still on the rug at her feet. “Stop. Trips wants you to punish him. But that’s not what I need. It’s not what he needs. So just, please, stop.”
RJ’s panting, the anger across his face unfamiliar, painful. Some part of my brain locks the image in my mind to analyze once I can process whatever the hell is going on here. But the rest of me is still playing catch-up.
I reach across the table, picking up the ring box, the hinge creaking as I force it open, a tinsel covered showstopper of a ring inside.
A socialite’s ring.
The ring of a rich man’s wife.
A ring for Archibald Clarence Westerhouse, the third’s wife.
RJ’s harsh whisper cuts through the hum in my ears. “You were supposed to keep her safe. That was the only job you had.”
Another image gets locked in my brain. This time, Trips with what I swear are a few tears stuck to his eyelashes as he struggles to breathe through whatever that hold is doing to him. “I know. I fucked up. I fucked all the way up,” he says.
Clara folds in on herself, pulling her knees to her forehead like she can’t bear to see what’s going on around her. “You weren’t the only one. So, stop. Please. What’s done is done. What’s past is past. If we’re going to fight for our future, this isn’t the way to do it.”
Jansen inches to his feet, slower than I’ve ever seen him move, and slips around the coffee table, kneeling in front of Clara, prying her fingers from her shins and into his hands. “I’m not giving you up,” he says, and she peeks through her legs at him, a watery smile on her devastated face.
But she says nothing back, and that tells me this is the end.
And my heart shatters.
Chapter 8
Clara
