Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 178117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 891(@200wpm)___ 712(@250wpm)___ 594(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 178117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 891(@200wpm)___ 712(@250wpm)___ 594(@300wpm)
I don’t want to hurt her, but after what she did, she leaves me no choice.
“Fuck that, we’re not letting her go,” Felix growls, butting in only to shove the handle of the knife inside me along with that pencil. “If we can’t have her, no one can.”
“Aren’t we supposed to interrogate her, though?” Dylan casually asks.
“She’ll only lie,” Felix says through gritted teeth while staring Penelope in the eyes.
“I know, but … why would she keep mentioning my dad?”
“Because he’s the one who told us to break up with both her and Eve!” Felix barks.
Penelope snorts, but the snort quickly turns into muffled laughter, so much so that all of us are now looking at her like she’s gone mad.
I don’t like this one bit.
I pull the knife and the pencil out of her.
“What are you laughing at?” Felix snarls, grasping her face with one hand.
“Okay, I want to know what she has to say. Now.” Dylan rips off the tape and chucks it out the window.
But all she can do is laugh out loud.
“What’s so fucking funny?” Dylan asks.
“You all think someone put me up to this, but it’s just me. It was all me,” she says between laughs. “And you don’t even realize it’s all your fucking father’s fault.”
Dylan frowns. “My father? No, he has nothing to do with whatever the fuck you’re doing. He literally came to help the firefighters.”
Her face changes. Stoically.
Like she’s suddenly given up and thought Oh what the hell … screw it.
“He spoke to Eve just before the bonfire and told her to end things or she’d be kicked out of the school,” she replies in a haze.
Dean Caruso spoke with Eve before she died?
“What?” Dylan mutters as he steps away while staring at Penelope with a blank face. He shakes his head. “No, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he—”
“Because she was fucking pregnant!”
DYLAN
I’m so dazed by what she says, I can barely even stand straight.
Eve … pregnant?
I hit a table while backtracking and almost fall but manage to catch myself on the wood, clutching the table like my life depends on it. “No, that can’t be it.”
“She was what?” Felix growls at her.
The dead-serious look in her eyes gives me chills. “She. Was. Pregnant.” She stares at me. “With your baby.”
My heart has never beaten this fast.
Not even when killing people.
“A baby?” Alistair mutters. “Wait, how do you know? And whose baby? Dylan’s?”
“No …” I whisper in shock.
“Don’t act like you didn’t know,” she says, her face stone-cold, despite the fact that she’s the one hanging on the cross as our plaything.
“We didn’t,” Alistair says.
She frowns. “Why else would you take his fucking side?”
“Whose side?” Alistair asks.
“His father’s!” she shrieks.
Everyone’s looking at me now, and all the blood drains from my skin.
A baby? But how?
Fuck, I gotta sit down.
My body instantly gravitates toward the nearest chair.
“Eve contacted your father and asked him for help,” Penelope tells me.
But my ears are ringing. All I hear is pregnant … Is it mine?
“Fuck no, you’re lying,” Felix says, and he turns to look at me. “Don’t let her poison your mind.”
“It’s the fucking truth!” she shrieks. “Swear on her fucking grave.”
Felix grasps her throat. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Don’t believe me?” she says with a squeaky voice as his fingers dig into her skin. “Look at her phone.”
Alistair and I immediately home in on her stuff that we brought back with us when we captured her on the road down the mountain. And we both jump at it like sharks going for blood.
“Fuck, let me have it,” I growl at him.
“I want to see too,” Alistair says.
We fight over it like crazed animals until Felix marches over to jab us both in the waist and steals the phone from our hands. “Give it to me.”
He immediately opens it up while we look over his shoulder along with him.
“The photos. Three months ago,” Penelope says.
He scrolls and scrolls until we find the one picture that says a million words.
A stick with two pink lines.
Fuck.
So it’s true.
She was pregnant.
Felix clamps the phone so harshly the screen fractures.
“Are you sure this is hers?” he asks without even looking at Penelope.
“She had no way out. Dylan’s father didn’t want her pregnant. So he gave her a choice. Leave or he’d destroy her and our family.”
“How do you know my father is involved?” I ask, my voice cracking.
“There’s an email. He deleted it on his side. I checked his office. But she kept the email,” Penelope replies, swallowing.
Felix vigorously scrolls through the phone until he finds what he’s looking for.
Eve’s email with my father, where he literally threatens her with complete ruin along with her entire family if she doesn’t abort it or disappear entirely.
Fuck.
I feel sick.
“That’s why he made her jump,” Penelope adds. “To erase the evidence.”
“But the phone survived,” Alistair mutters.