Page 53 of Such A Bad Girl

Fear gripped my heart as she kept talking.

“I gotta say, though. That took balls. And you pulled it off, too. All these years and no one suspected you at all. Impressive. Seriously.”

I tried to talk again, but it just came out a mumbled mess of moans.

“Oh, relax.” She laughed as she stared down at me with her icy gaze. “You’re finally getting what you deserve, Everleigh. Might as well lean into it.”

I thought of Theo, how angry he would be when he found out that I’d come to meet this freak alone. I was angry with myself now. What an idiot I was. Like some dumb character in a low-grade slasher film that makes a move so stupid that it has the whole theater shouting and throwing things.

I’d done the shouting a million times myself.

Now, I was the idiot making the dumb moves.

But I wasn’t about to let this be my final scene.

Chapter Thirty-One

THEO

It took way too long to fucking explain to West what was going on.

As soon as Rian and I burst into his house, I told him everything. Kaylee sat by his side as I tried to keep things brief. I’d left out the part about my feelings and all the sex and not-sex we’d had, because none of that shit mattered now.

But there were so many fucking questions and details, and by the time I was done, I was dying inside.

I’d been so slow, and Everleigh had been tied up the entire time.

“We tried calling her on the way over, obviously, but her phone is turned off,” Rian said.

“We need to call the cops,” I pleaded. “I’ll confess everything, I don’t fucking care.”

“Fuck that, dude,” Rian said. “I’m not letting you go down for that shit. You did what was right. It was a long time ago.”

“Not long enough,” Kaylee offered, her voice calm and steady. West sat silently there on the couch, but I could see the wheels in his head turning a million miles a minute. “You’d still be charged. And after all these years, with no evidence to prove you were protecting Everleigh, it would be a mess. You and Everleigh would both probably get some prison time, even in the best-case scenario.”

“Fuck!” Rage filled my veins. I’d been trying to protect her, in Austin and ever since, and look how much I’d fucked up it all up. I’d ruined any chance of ever getting what I wanted, which was a future with Everleigh. And now that it had all come to light, West would never trust me again.

“That’s not the problem right now,” West barked out. “Fuck the cops, they’re not going to be able to do anything that we can’t. We have money. We have resources.”

“Give me your phone,” Kaylee said, reaching out a hand towards me. “I have lots of friends at the precinct that will help us on the down low. We need to keep this out of the press right now. As soon as they get a whiff that Everleigh’s missing, they’ll swarm. We need to move fast to help Everleigh. We’ll start by tracing the text message you received.”

I handed her my phone, my hands trembling, my heart sinking with fear.

If anything happened to Everleigh, I only had myself to blame.

Chapter Thirty-Two

EVERLEIGH

Iestimated that about a half an hour had passed since she left me alone.

The ropes dug into my wrists as I tried to work the knots loose. In the darkness, I was all alone with my thoughts and the blistering fear.

Despair ripped through every cell in my body.

I had to fight back. I wasn’t going to just lie down and accept this shit.

But, I had to free myself.

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