Mia looked up, grinning like she’d found buried treasure, and ripped her sunglasses off. “There she is. God, you look like a Victorian ghost. Is there no self-tanner in this castle?”
I laughed for the first time in days, the sound bursting out of me before I could stop it. Jules, who still hadn’t taken that aggrieved look off his face, softened a little, his eyes darting to me. “You’re okay with company?”
“Of course she is,” Mia scoffed. “I’m herbest friend.”
I smiled softly and nodded. Jules let out a relieved breath, eyes flicking between us, clearly running through worst-case scenarios at lightning speed. “Stay on the property. I’ll be around if you need anything. And please, Renford, don’t break anything.”
Mia saluted. “Yes, Daddy Warbucks.”
The moment Jules disappeared down the hall, she grabbed my wrists and dragged me across the room. “Okay, you are not spending another second moping in this mausoleum.”
“I wasn’t moping,” I protested weakly.
“You’re surrounded by knick-knacks dustier than my great-grandma’s ashes, and you’re not watching any reality TV,” she shot back. “You’re definitely moping, and that stops now.”
“Ireallycan’t leave the property, Mia. I don’t want to make him angrier.”
“I know. We won’t leave, but we’re going to make this place a hell of a lot less depressing.”
Mia turned my room into chaos in under three minutes. She threw the wispy pink curtains open and began to blast pop music from her phone. My neatly folded clothes were dumped onto the floor, and all my blankets were shoved into their place on thebed. She turned on the twinkling lights and shoved me onto the bed before getting onto her phone and furiously typing on it.
“We’re doing a girl’s day,” she declared. “That means face masks, bad movies, sugar, and gossip. You look like you haven’t eaten or made a bad decision in days.”
“That’s because I haven’t.”
She paused, bright eyes flying up from her screen, studying me more carefully now. “Okay. The decision thing, I get, because you don’t have a bad bone in your body. But the eating thing?”
I bit my lip and nodded. “I mean, I’ve eatensome.”
Like once a day. My body just didn’t want any more. It didn’t wantanythingbut Alek. Not even food.
“So something’s wrong-wrong.”
I swallowed and didn’t answer.
Mia waited a few minutes, making sure it was completely silent in the hall and that Jules wasn’t lurking in some dark corner, before leaning in, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Is this about him? Is it about Ale?—”
“Shhh.” I slammed a hand over her mouth, my stomach flipping at the thought of him. “You can’t say his name, Mia. Jules will go ballistic if you even mention him.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh my God. Itisabout him. I knew something was wrong when President Buzzkill called me and asked me to come over.”
I sank onto the bed with a sigh, grabbing a fluffy pink pillow and slamming it over my face to keep from crying anymore. “It’s bad, Mia.”
“What happened? I thought you guys were doing great.”
“Wewere.”
I told her everything. Well, not everything—there were some details that should remain between me, Alek, and the things he made me feel in the shadows—but enough. I told her about all the flowers, the dates, and the protectiveness. I told her aboutAlek calming me down after my mental illness threw me into a spiral and how he took me home. And I was pretty sure that by the raised eyebrow she was giving me, she knew enough about what happened there.
But then I told her about the dinner, the feud I had no idea about, the grief Alek had been carrying for seventeen years. I told her about the guns and the bullet and the pain. Then, I told her about how Jules forced Alek away and locked me inside his home to force me to recover and get over my love for him.
My voice cracked when I told her about the two weeks of silence that felt like a slow suffocation, being buried alive as I watched more and more dirt shoveled onto me.
Mia listened without interrupting, ripping open two jelly face masks and applying them to both of our faces, her expression focused like this was one of Madame Germaine’s debriefs.
“It’s over, Mia,” I sniffled, tears welling, and my nose clogged with gross snot that I wiped away with the tissue she handed me. “He’s gone.”
“He’s not gone. That boy is obsessed with you. You are that man’s personal drug, and he is addicted with a capital A. I saw the way he looked at you at the club. He’s tweaking without you. I’m guessing he’s doing everything in his power to get you back.”
