I’m the problem. I always have been.
Check the hallway—empty, dark. Everyone must still be downstairs, or maybe they've gone to bed. Either way, I'm not sticking around to find out.
I slip out of my room, down the back stairs, through the kitchen. The house is quiet. Too quiet. Every creak of the floorboards sounds like a gunshot.
The garage door feels impossibly loud when I ease it open. My car is right where I left it. I throw my bag in the back seat, slide behind the wheel, and pull out of the driveway with my headlights off.
I don't turn them on until I'm a block away.
Then I'm driving. Away from the house. Away from them. Away from everything I've ruined.
The address glows on my phone screen. Forty minutes away.
I press the gas pedal a little harder.
One meeting. Get the suppressants. Find a motel. Disappear.
Then I won't be anyone's burden anymore.
Chapter 25
The neighborhood gets worse the farther I drive.
Strip malls give way to boarded-up storefronts. Streetlights flicker or don't work at all. The few people I see on the sidewalks move with their heads down, shoulders hunched against something more than the cold.
My GPS announces the turn in that flat, robotic voice.In 500 feet, turn left onto Harbor Avenue.
I turn. The street narrows. Industrial buildings loom on either side—warehouses, a shuttered auto body shop, something that might have been a meatpacking plant before it was abandoned. Chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Graffiti on every surface.
This is–
This might have been a mistake.
The thought surfaces and I shove it down. I don't have a choice. I need those suppressants. I need to get out of this city before the heat takes me again, before I end up back in that house, back in that bed, back on my back with my thighs spread wide begging three men who don't even want me to—
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel.
Focus.
The intersection comes up faster than I expected. I pull over to the curb, killing my headlights, and check my phone. 10:27. Three minutes early.
The street is empty. No other cars. No pedestrians. Just me and the darkness and the distant sound of traffic on the highway overpass a few blocks away.
I wait.
The heat pulses under my skin, a low simmer that hasn't stopped since I left the house. My thighs are a little sticky with slick. My cock is half-hard and has been for the entire drive, which is humiliating and uncomfortable and exactly the kind of detail Idon'twant to be thinking about right now.
10:28.
I scan the street again. Still nothing. Maybe I got the address wrong. Maybe this whole thing is a scam and I just drove forty minutes for nothing and I'll have to go back to that house and face—
Headlights.
A car turns onto the street behind me. Dark sedan, tinted windows. It rolls past slowly, then pulls to a stop about twenty feet ahead.
My heart hammers. This is it.
I grab the cash from my center console—two hundred and eighty-three dollars, everything I had plus what I scraped from the emergency fund Margot gave me. It's not quite three hundred, but maybe they'll take it. Maybe I can negotiate.
