Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
I didn’t worry too much about it before because I was guaranteed that the spell would keep him by my side forever. But now that, too, seems to have been jeopardized, and there was nothing I could do about it for the time being because I had no idea where he was.
I’d been so lost in thought that I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going. Not that I would’ve known because the place still looked unfamiliar. We couldn’t have gone too far, though, because I don’t remember us driving for that long after they picked me up in front of Mary’s place.
I was starting to count my lucky stars that those men had let me go, and I was free. No one knew where I was, so I was safe. As soon as I had the thought and was beginning to feel a little better about this turn of events, I turned the corner and walked into the middle of a throng of reporters. It was as if they were waiting for me.
“There she is. Is it true that…. Did you know that….” The questions were coming hard and fast, and once again, I felt trapped and ambushed. The flash of the cameras did something strange to me, and the fear I felt was indescribable. I had the fleeting thought that this was a far cry from what I was used to.
I was usually the one calling them any time Ryder and I were going to be out somewhere together. Just knowing that she would see us holding hands as we walked side by side was enough to make my whole damn week.
It didn’t matter that he never really held my hand, never closed his fingers around mine, or that I was always the one doing the holding. I’m sure no one had ever noticed those little details; it was enough that everyone thought we were together. A happy, loving couple.
So where had it all gone wrong? “Move, get out of my way.” I tried turning my face away from the cameras and ignored their questions as they dogged my every step. “Is it true that Ryder and Elena have gotten back together?” That question made my blood boil, and I was no longer interested in keeping up the disinterested façade.
“She’ll never have him; he loves me, only me.” Even I was surprised by my voice. It didn’t sound like me, not at all like my usual amiable tone when talking to the paparazzi. I pushed my way through them as their questions felt like stones and darts against my mind. “Leave me alone,” I screamed and started running away, looking for a dark alley that I could disappear into.
It’s not true; it can’t be true. My skin felt too tight, and I wanted to climb out of it. My mind was jumping around from one thought to the next, but nothing made sense. My chest felt tight each time I replayed those words in my head. That’s the one thing I cannot live with. Ryder being anywhere near that bitch, Elena.
The tears flowed freely down my cheeks in frustration and anger. Is it true? Or just another lie from the paparazzi? I’d fed them enough over the years to suspect anything that came out of their mouths. So why did I already believe that it might be true?
The fact that I always ignored that he was still thinking about her doesn’t make it any less so. The nights he’d cried out for her in his sleep, those nights I’d wanted to hunt her down and murder her were always fresh in my mind.
Those nights and those tears had only served to make me hate her more. The whole world was always moaning and groaning about her pain. That was another one of our reasons for constantly attacking her. She had too much public sentiment when Ryder and I first got married, so it was easy back then to paint her as the villain.
No one knew for sure why Ryder had chosen me, so it was easy to spin it my way and make her out to be the reason for their breakup. No one knew that I had been stalking him for years or of our plans for me to become his wife since I was fourteen years old or thereabouts.
Each time things died down, and she came back with some new venture or the other, we’d ramp up the old propaganda machine, using the idiots on the Internet as our mouthpiece to do our bidding after the bots had dominated the headlines with whatever spiel we fed them. We can get back there; there must be a way to turn this all around.
Mary has been doing it for years; how else did she get the world to believe that those sluttish talentless hacks she calls daughters were superstars? A thought struck me just then. Her son, he hates them all, his mother and sisters. The poor boy had eaten himself into the size of half a cow to protect himself from them.