Page 18 of Filthy Secret

I am pissed.

And I do not hide it.

“We’re cleaning this shit up,” I announce.

Rim chuckles. “I figured you’d say as much.”

He may have guessed that I would say that, but he doesn’t know why exactly. “Ryan comes home tomorrow, so this shit needs to look like she wasn’t attacked.”

“She coming home already?” Rim asks.

Clenching my jaw, I nod once. “She is, but I’m not fucking happy about it. I think she should stay in the hospital a little longer.”

“Without seeing her, just judging by the state of this place, I would say you’re absolutely right.”

Rim takes his phone out of his pocket and slides his fingers around it before I hear the sound of some Tool filling the room. Rock music to clean to. I can be down with that. He takes the kitchen and living room while I make my way toward the back of the small house where the bedrooms are located.

They, too, are fucking trashed, which makes me sick, especially when I walk into little Adam’s bedroom. He’s got a car bed, a dresser, and some toys, but not much else. Although I guess kids don’t really need heaps of shit. I have no fucking clue, really.

However, everything that he does own has been pulled out of the drawers and closet and strewn all over the floor. If it were my shit, I would pick it up and shove it back into the drawers without a care in the world, but this is a little kid, and there’s no way Ryan wants to come home to this shit and reorganize.

So, I do something that I’ve never done before. I fold laundry, organize toys, and get the room cleaned up as best I can. When I’m finished with that, I make my way toward the master bedroom and pause at the doorway.

It’s not just that Ryan’s shit is everywhere. I expected that. It’s that things are broken, ripped, damaged. It’s that the headboard of her bed has scratch marks. That there are chunks of wood missing. It’s the broken lamp. The shattered mirror on her dresser.

She fought her ass off in here.

Anger slides through my veins, making them like blocks of ice at the sight of everything in front of me. I don’t even know how to process what has happened. Nobody at the hospital said anything about this.

I call down to the hospital, asking for Ryan’s floor and room number. It rings a couple times before I hear her soft, raspy voice on the other end of the line. She sounds confused as fuck, and normally, I would think that maybe it was cute. Right now, I’m too pissed at the state of her bedroom to think that.

“What happened to you here?” I demand.

“What?” she asks. “Where?”

“Your bedroom. I’m standing in it, and I can tell you right now that I think there was a hell of a lot more to this struggle. Do you want to tell me what really happened?”

My words might seem harsh or demanding because that’s what they are, but I need to know exactly how I’m going to torture this fucking asshole when I find him.

“Did he violate you, legs?” I ask, my tone coming out softer, kinder because what I’m asking is a really big fucking deal.

There is a moment of silence. I think that maybe she’s hung up the phone, but then I hear her let out a sigh.

“In some ways, yes, but in the way you’re asking, no.”

“But he tried?”

“He tried,” she confirms.

“You’re a fighter, Ryan.”

I hear her hiccup, and then she exhales loudly into the phone. “I tried really hard.”

“You succeeded, legs. Fucking legend. I’ll be back soon with some food. Hold tight.”

Ending the call, I shove my phone into my back pocket and spend the next hour putting her bedroom back together as best I can. Once she’s able to leave this place, she’s never fucking coming back, not in a million goddamn years.

Her life in Harmony Springs, Arkansas, is over. She’s coming home. Back to Pineville, where she belongs, and that is fucking that. Because I’ll never let her or that kid of hers live in fear again. It doesn’t matter what she did to me six years ago. She doesn’t deserve to have this shit, her sister’s shit, on her shoulders.

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