Police... My heart slammed against my ribs. What if this is it. What if this is how it ends. Thoughts started piling over one another too fast to sort. This is a setup. She knows. She’s stallingme. Someone’s outside. Watching. Waiting. I’m standing in the open like a fucking idiot and,
“Rowan?”Her voice cut through it, closer now.
“There’s a café,”she said gently.
“Just around the corner. We can just sit. Talk. That’s all.”
My jaw tightened. That’s never all. But against every sane instinct I had, I nodded. Her face lit up, and I hated that I noticed.
“Okay,”
She breathed out, relief threading through her voice in a way that sounded real enough to confuse me.
“Okay… good.”
She stayed close when we walked. I could feel her even without looking, smell her, the old, familiar scent of her perfume penetrating my nostrils. After a few minutes of walking in silence, we arrived at the café. The café was small, warm, way too warm. The air thick with coffee and something sweet that made my stomach twist in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
We sat. She talked, I listened.
“I’m so sorry,”she said at one point, her hands wrapped around the cup like she needed something to hold onto.
“Everything that happened, I should’ve… I should’ve done something.”My eyes stayed on her. Should have... Her voice wavered.
“I should’ve protected you from him.”
From him? What about herself?
“I didn’t,”she continued, shaking her head, like she couldn’t quite accept it.“And I hate myself for that.”I fucking doubt it.
“I mean it,”she added quickly, searching my face like she needed me to believe her.
“I hate that I didn’t stop him.”My finger curled slightly against the table. You didn’t stop. Not once.
“I’m… glad,”she said, softer now, her voice dropping in a way that felt almost like a confession.
“I’m glad you did it.”
Wait, what? That made something shift inside me.
“He didn’t deserve to live,”she continued, eyes darkening as they locked onto mine.
“You did what needed to be done.”Something in me narrowed, and I looked at her properly.
“And now…”she exhaled, something lighter slipping into her tone.
“Now I’m free.”Free to do what exactly? Fuck more teenagers? Fucking hell.
“I moved,”she added quickly.
“After everything. I couldn’t stay there. It just…”she shook her head.
“I have my own place now. It’s… better.”
I couldn’t make sense of what was happening right in front of me. And I’m probably the last person in the world who should have anything good to say about Bartosz, but in the six years I lived with them, I never saw him be cruel or violent toward Krystyna. Well, aside from the one time he walked in while my cock was buried deep inside her. But even then, I was the one who took the worst beating.
Even if I chose to believe her, to believe the words coming out of her mouth, there would still be too many questions. Too many things that didn’t make sense in my head, no matter how I tried to piece them together.
What happened when she opened the door to my room the next morning and found Bartosz, or what was left of him, spread across the floor?
