Page 78 of Riff

I felt like I was losing my grip on reality.

“Leave me alone,” I said to Riff before slamming the door hard in his face.

To his credit, he did what I asked.

Even if a part of me ached for him to follow me, to apologize, to say he was wrong.

Because he was, damnit.

That was wrong.

Not necessarily going. I understood that the club had lost a lot of money on that deal, and that, eventually, they would have to go back to get some sort of revenge for that.

But he was wrong to lie to me about it.

For well over a week now.

Each time we were together, there was this big thing he was keeping from me.

Maybe it was wrong to feel so betrayed by this. But I was still raw, damnit. I was still trying to learn to trust people, especially men. And it had been so easy with Riff. Because he’d been so honest with me.

It felt like all that trust was crumbling now that I realized he hadn’t been.

I paced around the grounds for a while, but I was aware of everyone inside, likely talking about me, discussing how to handle me and my outburst.

A bitter little laugh escaped me as I rushed away from the clubhouse, deciding this was as good a time as ever to take my first little solo walk.

I needed to cool down.

I knew I was probably overreacting, but I couldn’t seem to reason with my overwrought emotions right then. Even if the flashing memories had stopped, they felt like they still had a hold on me.

But I found myself all the way into town and it was all still right there, asking to be acknowledged instead of tamped down.

On a desperate hope for some calming, I found myself walking up to my therapist’s office, knowing she told me she had an open-door policy for me. If she was with another client, I could just wait until she had a few minutes.

So that was exactly what I did, sitting in the uncomfortable chair in her waiting room, ignoring the way the secretary kept casting sympathetic glances my way.

Until, finally, the door opened, and Dr. Swift was walking out with another young woman whose eyes were still red and puffy from crying.

I’d been there so many times too.

Silently, I hoped she had someone to go home to, someone to support her.

“Vienna,” Dr. Swift said, voice surprised. Then, “Come on in,” she said, waving toward the open door to her office.

Dr. Swift had been nothing like I’d been expecting. I guess I’d imagined her being much older, kind of sedate in her dress, with one of those generic, kind faces.

But Dr. Swift was tall, statuesque, a gorgeous blonde with icy blue eyes and a charming cleft chin. She was always dressed professionally, of course, but her suits and suit dresses were always perfectly tailored to fit her lithe body, making her look more like she belonged in a board room for a billion-dollar company rather than in a tiny little therapy office in a nowhere town like Shady Valley.

“What happened?” she asked, already knowing that something must have if I was showing up out of the blue.

“He went back to the house,” I told her. There were no secrets between us. She knew every ugly detail of what had happened to me. In the van after I’d been taken. In the shed. And everything since. “He went back and he didn’t tell me.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, sitting calmly at the edge of her desk as I paced her office.

“I found my old purse shoved in the back of his wardrobe. He must have found it there.”

“You’re upset because he lied to you,” she assumed.

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