The Starkest Truth (A Breaking Insanity Novel Book 2) (17 page)

I let him go and clasped my hands behind my head. I was so pissed, I could feel the heat rushing over my skin.

“As for Nikki, if I know you, the withdrawal she’s currently experiencing from your diminished affections will make her easily open her legs to me. She and I are building a rapport. It won’t be very much longer before I get what I want from her.”

For old times sake, I punched him in the throat, crushing his windpipe. He fell to his knees, wheezing and choking before I left.
 

No one fucks with what belongs to me unless I’m in the mood to share…and I would never share Nikki with anyone.

I PADDED TO the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. Lifting up my T-shirt, I examined my stomach. At present, it was a small pouch. According to what little Eric would tell me about my pregnancy after he calmed down—a couple of weeks after our first pre-natal appointment—I was at nine weeks.
 

The doorbell rang while I was in the midst of searching for keys in order to take Kifo for a walk. I couldn’t find them anywhere, nor the place I usually stored them. When I spotted a note on the refrigerator in Eric’s writing, I obtained my answer. Eric had hidden the keys to my mother’s Land Rover and Lexus. If I needed immediate help, there was a number at the bottom. Otherwise, I was directed to remain on bed rest.

The doorbell rang again, making me curse Chopin for the umpteenth time. Hoping it wasn’t Janet, I took my time answering the door. Since I allowed her be the one of two people to witness my marriage to Eric, she thought we were the best of friends and would drop by unannounced at sporadic intervals.
 

But when I opened the door amidst Kifo’s growling barks, I was greeted with a smiling April, trailing a rolling bag behind her. “Girlfriend!” she screeched and hugged me.

I shrugged off her hug, trying to shrug off my shock as well. When I left her at Parkland, with how unwell she was, I thought the next time I’d see her would be in a coffin.

“I haven’t forgotten my bestest. I know you’re not big on the affection thing.” She hit me on the shoulder, pouted, and folded her arms. “What’s this I hear about you getting married? Saw a blurb in the society pages. Daughter of deceased financial guru marries gorgeous doctor. Well, they didn’t put in the gorgeous part, but from the way you talked about him at Parkland, I knew he had to be.” She came inside without invitation and closed the door behind her. “We won’t even talk about how you were supposed to tell me you two got back together and motivate me to get out.”
 

“How did you find out? We weren’t allowed access to the outside world at Parkland.”

“A newbie snuck a tablet in. If I paid her with drugs, she let me borrow it for an hour.” She stopped and pointed to the picture above the mantle. In a daze, she examined my favorite picture of Ethan, taken by his friend Melonie while he was swimming inside a lake. “Is that him?”

“It…is.”

“Yes, girlfriend! I can totally see why you’re in love with that. I would be, too.”

I rolled my eyes, because his looks weren’t the reason I was drawn to him. If it had been the case, the first time I met him, I would’ve hopped on his third leg and spun with reckless abandon like so many other women would have. “April…why are you here?”

“What’s with the lack of happiness to see me?” she asked through a seemingly permanent pout. “I thought we were buddies.”
 

“We were—are—I guess. The timing of your visit isn’t the greatest.”

“Well, I hope it can be a good time because my parents shut the door in my face. I stole my brother’s car and drove all the way up here from Freehold. Did you hear that? Freehold? Do you know how hellish the traffic was? I was this close”—she pinched her fingers together—“to road raging.” She looked around the living room area from where we stood. “I didn’t know where you lived. I knocked on every door until I met someone who could tell me which house was yours. It was good fortune you happened to be the twelfth house down. It’s a really good thing you live in the only gated community on Braddock Bay. How much would that have sucked if you were in a bigger town…or something. I’m starving.” She left her rolling bag in the middle of the living room and roamed into the kitchen.
 

I stared at it, feeling a bit of the pull from Eric’s neat-freak tendencies. I shook them off and met April in the kitchen to watch her search through the refrigerator. “Whatcha got to eat? Damn. Fully-stocked and whole bunch of ready made meals? Why do they have numbers on them? Are these dates? No, they are times. I’m shocked, girlfriend. I thought you’d have a grocery store’s worth of green juice.” She glanced back at me. “But looking at your figure and the crazy amount of cooked food, I guess Eric is making sure you’re eating good.” She shut the refrigerator door and jumped up to sit on the counter. “Is Eric coming home soon?” She looked at her nails pensively. “Will he cook when he does? I don’t really like the stuff in the Tupperware. Too fattening.”

I shifted my weight in discomfort, because there was too much to say and not enough time to say the bulk of it. “April, you can’t stay here.”

Moisture began to well up in her eyes. “W-why not?”

I blamed the hormones for my answer. It was the only excuse I could muster to explain why her disappointment would’ve affected me at all. A part of me felt like I owed her for the little things she did for me when we were in Parkland. She looked out for me in a way many hadn’t before. “Fine. One week.”

Ecstatic over my answer, she squealed and jumped into my arms.

I wrestled her arms from around my neck. “Would you stop doing that?”

She gave me a funny look and looked down my body. Her gaze stopped at my stomach. “I thought you got a little happy in love pudge, but I guess I was wrong. You’re preggers?”

I shuddered at the use of the word preggers. Startled she could tell so early, I closed my cardigan tighter around my body.

“There’s nothing for me to eat. Why don’t we go somewhere?”

I looked at the time. “Most of the places around are crowded right now. It’s the dinner hour. Besides, I don’t have any transportation.”

She crossed her eyes and whirled her head around. “Nikki, you don’t have to lie,” she goaded me. “I have a car. You can do this. Come on. I’m with you every step of the way. Let’s find a dive.”

“Even if I could go, the problem hasn’t fully resolved itself. Sometimes I can manage, sometimes I can’t. My parasite won’t let me take any medication to get me there.”

She crossed her eyes again and mouthed, “Parasite?”
 

I lifted a brow at her and shrugged.

“Yeah…you’re still so goth…or is it emo?” She waved off her inane stream of consciousness and smiled. “Fill me in. I’ve been bored since you left Parkland. I need some excitement.”

“Not much to tell.”

“The lies you tell. Man like Eric? I’m sure you have a million stories to tell about him.”
 

I didn’t exactly know what to tell her. He’d barely spoken to me since our visit with Dr. Savine. Seemed nothing I did could draw him to the man I preferred and have him stick around. Instead, he was persistently the man he was with other people around me.

He was now driving me as crazy as he claimed I drove him. He was right about the withdrawal, but that’s the sad fact about addiction. We’re never addicted to the things that are wholly good for us. The fact that they were detrimental devices served as an aspect of the appeal; the guilty pleasure was the catalyst.
 

My guilty pleasure seemed hell-bent on putting me through rapid detox, only to give me a taste of the drug I craved when I finally detoxed. The cycle would never end. It would get worse when the baby was born. I couldn’t estimate exactly how much worse it would be.

I COULDN’T BELIEVE where the fuck I was.

Victor Mejía bought a home ten miles away from Nikki’s place; it wasn’t a coincidence. He was my last resort. I knew how the dominos would fall once I stepped through the door. The craving had been starved so much it didn’t exist anymore. Meeting with the man would awaken it, and that man would show himself to Nikki. She hadn’t experienced him full-throttle yet, and I wanted to keep it that way. Need will make you do things you swore to never do. Preston became a completely unusable, unstable fuck, forcing me to seek out extreme solutions to a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
 

The front door swung open before I had a chance to ring the bell. Big tits, tall, dark hair…young. Definitely Vic's type. He disguised his girls as housekeepers, but they couldn’t clean for shit, and fucked him nightly. She was no different. They were ‘trained’ for him in a very unconventional way. We used to debate about it. I never thought you needed a steel room and a strong backhand to sway a woman into your way of thinking; he argued the contrary.
 

He wasn’t bestowed with the gifts I had. It was a sad, fucked up fact. Looks played a lot into what you could and couldn’t get away with, but it didn’t explain the reason why Vic had to take a different route. He was criminally-minded and very educated on the inner workings of the streets, but when it came to women, he had no idea how to win with finesse. He had no other choice, but to break them his way. My way was intricate, and in my opinion, more satisfying. It was like a business acquisition to me. Why bulldoze a building and build over it, when you can infiltrate the inside, easily taking over from the top down and the inside out.

I lost my way when I met Nikki, and my pawns—without my attention—spun out of control. It’s a good thing the most unruly ones are dead now. Their deaths weren’t remotely close to a minor tragedy; the world is a microscopically better place without them around.
 

The only thing Vic and I shared in common, besides our blood ties, was our taste in interior design. Clean lines. White and Black. Funny we like our inanimate surroundings to be boring, but the people we surrounded ourselves with could entertain many during their stints inside a psych ward.
 

There was one thing I didn’t like about his house—it reminded me too much of the one I was brought up in.

“Can I get you a drink, Dr. Brenton?” Vic’s “housekeeper” asked, leading me down the hall to the grand room.

“I’m good.”
 

She opened the heavy metal doors to Vic’s office. Vic had a Bluetooth in his ear and a drink in one hand. In his native dialect, he threatened to cut off the intended’s cock and send it to his mother with a bow tied around it.
 

Victor wasn’t one to be fucked with. He’d done some semblance of the same thing to his third ex-wife’s boy-toy.

“My man,” his longtime bodyguard and one time my friend, Pete, greeted me with a handshake and half hug. “Glad you came around. Been too long. Why are you such a stranger lately?”

“Been busy. I almost didn’t recognize you now that you look like a meat head,” I said casually, trying to avoid showing him that I was a little irritated about his decision to show himself to Nikki at the worst of times—Casper’s wedding.

“Yeah, I’ve been shredding at the gym for years.” He pointed to my ring. “Heard about you getting hitched. Is the wife the looker next to you at the wedding? Nice, man. Congrats. Is this time for real?”

I gave him a short nod. Wished people would stop asking me different versions of the same exact question. It wasn’t their business, but where Pete was concerned, I understood the curiosity—he and Vic attended my wedding to Estelle. They knew from the very beginning about the nature of my relationship with her. She didn’t fully find out the truth until it was too late; the woman never meant anything to me.