Total pages in book: 169
Estimated words: 162138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
I’ve done everything in my power to find her. I stay in touch with Prescott, but the fucker never slips up and tells me shit, so I have to depend on stalking social media accounts. I even pinned a private investigator on Pres and got nothing, but I know he knows where she is. Sometimes, I want to beat the information out of him. Knowing him and his undying loyalty to her, he would let me beat him to death before giving anything away. I look at the file sitting on my desk.
At Duke Tech, we managed to do in a few days what I couldn’t do in three years, and now that I have my answer, I’m nervous to see what I’ll find. Every morning, I envision what I’ll do when I see her again. By the end of the day, I’m so fucking angry that the only thing I’m certain of is that I’m going to make her life hell, which is where I’ve been living from the moment she left. Three fucking years in hell. Three years of wondering where she is and who she’s with.
My life was carefully planned out before she came along and turned it upside down. Because of her, I got fucked over on everything I’d been promised. In less than two months, she managed to shatter everything I’d worked my entire life for. And, for what? I ended up seriously injured, got fucked over by the team I was supposed to sign with, and didn’t even get the girl. I. Didn’t. Even. Get. The. Girl. And she didn’t just run. No, Lyla James can’t do anything half-assed. She had to go and change her fucking identity, making it impossible to find her. Who changes their identity? Someone running from someone. Obviously. I need to know who it is and when I find out, I’m going to make them pay triple — once for what they did to her, once for making her run from me, and once for fucking me over.
But first, I’m going to make her pay. For three years, I’ve pictured her leading a boring life somewhere in her baggy clothes with a permanent scowl on her face, so when I saw the picture of her a few days ago, I went from very upset to fucking livid. On Marissa’s birthday, I watched Prescott’s IG extra closely, the way I do every year. For the past two years, he’s posted little things — drinks, dinner, but nothing that exposes where he is or who he’s with. This year, when I was refreshing my feed every couple of seconds, like I was in the queue for fucking concert tickets, he finally made the post I’d been waiting for.
At two in the morning, he shared a picture in his close friends’ group. I clicked it quickly, just in case he’d made a mistake. The punch in the gut was immediate. My hands shook, as I paused the picture and screenshotted it. While my finger was on the screen, holding the image steady, I stared at Lyla Motherfucking James. Alive and well, wearing a sexy-as-fuck outfit in the arms of another man. AND SHE WAS LAUGHING. She was fucking LAUGHING. The next post was a video that I’m sure he didn’t mean to upload, since it didn’t actually show anything.
But I heard her voice as she told some asshole named Wade that, “he smelled like an ashtray but smelled good underneath it.” She’d said it in her sarcastic as fuck tone. He laughed loudly and told her she was funny, and I wanted to reach into the phone and strangle him. I’d called my brother in the middle of the night, because even though I was a master screenshotter, up until now, I hadn’t had to save a video from someone’s story. Liam talked through it and I kinda wish he hadn’t. I’ve listened to it more times than I can count, and each time I get more heated than the last. Just thinking about it now makes my pressure go up. My fists pound my desk once.
“Lach!”
“What?”
“You need to calm the fuck down,” he says slowly, as if he’s afraid I’ll lash out at him.
I pull the file closer. “What about the guy she was with?”
“What about him?” Liam takes a seat across from me.
“Who is he?”
“You can barely see his face and we only have one name to go by. We don’t even know if it’s his first or last.”
I close my eyes and take three deep breaths to control my temper. These days, it doesn’t take much to set me off. I’m a ticking time bomb waiting for someone to push me just enough to make me explode. I lost count of how many times I’d ended up in the sin bin these last three seasons. I pinch the bridge of my nose and focus on breathing. When I’m calm enough, I look at my brother again.