Page 143 of Sinful Bride

I meet her gaze. I don’t know how to answer her.

Everything, Mama.

Everything is wrong.

51

DAPHNE

“I am going to respectfully insist—again—that we get back in the car and drive back to the penthouse.” Lev aims his worried stare at me. “We were never here. Your husband doesn’t have to know.”

“I’m not here to keep secrets, Lev.” I offer a small smile. Then I look to the decrepit manor looming in front of us. “I’m just… going home.”

“You and I both know it’s a trap.”

I blow out a long, heavy sigh. “I know. Which is why I’m going to give you this.” I hand him the burner cell, freshly charged and turned on.

Lev doesn’t look away from me, but his frown deepens.

“Keep it on,” I say. “You’ll be able to hear everything that goes on in there, okay? And if there’s any trouble at all, you come get me out. Whatever it takes.” I meet his eyes with steely resolve in my own. “I’m going to return to my daughter tonight. I won’t have it any other way.”

He sighs as he accepts the phone from my hand, a call between it and mine still active.

“If it goes silent,” he warns before I turn to leave, “I’m coming in. Scream or no scream, I’m following my gut.”

“I know, Lev.” I pat him on the shoulder. “I appreciate you more than you could ever know.”

Then I start the walk.

The manor is vastly different from what I knew as a child. The gardens are dried up, the grass wild and unkempt, and rot has begun to creep up the tree trunks like the ground itself is poison. My parents used to invest thousands of dollars in landscaping alone, just to make sure everyone who drove by knew how successful and influential they were.

The past tense is the important part there. Were. Used to. Things have changed now.

I don’t bother ringing the doorbell or knocking. They know I’m coming.

I walk into the main foyer and stifle my gasp of horror. I never expected to see so much dust, so many cobwebs, so much broken beyond repair.

But maybe this is the truth no one wanted to see.

That everything was just for show. On display to entertain.

Including the daughters they raised here.

I hear footsteps. My mother emerges from the corridor. When she sees me, her eyes raise—at least as much as decades of Botox and facelifts will allow them to—and then whips around and goes right where she came from.

Then: voices. More footsteps. Two pairs this time, growing louder and louder until both of my parents reappear.

They look frumpy, dirty in ways I can’t quite explain. Worn down at the edges. Like the trees outside, they’re rotting from the trunk.

My father strides toward me, lips puckered to nearly nothing. When he’s close enough, I start to speak. “Dad, I?—”

The crack of his backhand across my face echoes in the cold entryway. The sound of it is the only warning I get before the pain sets in.

And the floor rises up to catch me.

Stewart leans over me where I fell, red in the face and foaming at the mouth. “You don’t get to whore yourself to some poor excuse of a mobster and then act like you have the high ground. What you do, you selfish little bitch, is whatever I fucking tell you to!”

I wobble to my feet while he spews his tirade. My face still stings like crazy, and I’d be lying if I said he’s not scaring the shit out of me with how unhinged he’s become.

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