Page 21 of Seizing Control: Part One

The impact makes my hand sting.

I don’t care.

It’s worth it to see the shock in his eyes.

Then, remorse hits at the thought of hurting him, and the need to cry returns with vengeance. I tilt my face toward the ceiling to stop the tears from falling as I beg, “Let me down, please. I can’t—I thought… I can’t do this. I can’t be this close to yo-ou.”

“Don’t.” The single word he utters is filled with more shame than one man should rightly feel. He pushes between my thighs and hugs me to him. As I battle with my own emotions, Zeke presses his face to my heart and tightens his arms around my lower back. “If you cry... I’m gonna lose it.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

My ire instantly resurfaces.

The guilt I feel for slapping him evaporates.

“Oh... Fuck. You.” My grip is vicious when I tug on his hair to make him look me in the eye. “You’re the big man. You call the shots. Surely you have the balls to face the consequences?”

“I couldn’t watch you break. Not again. Not like that. It was my fault. The safe house. Alex. The baby.” I jerk like he’s hit me when he mentions the child we lost. “I thought I had everythin’ under control, but I was foolin’ myself.”

“You were under something, all right. I hope Honey gave you syphilis.”

“I don’t think that exists anymore.”

I exhale angrily as he tries to rile me up. There’s no way I’ll allow him to use our long-standing connection to finesse his way out of the mess he created. Zeke can use his puppy dog eyes and beg until the end of time, and it’ll have no effect on how I feel.

He left me, beaten, bleeding, and blacked out, then cut a deal with my father to stay gone.

“My sentiment—” I glower at the stubborn man when he opens his mouth to deny screwing Honey. “—still stands.”

Zeke doesn’t heed my warning. “I didn’t fuck her.”

“So, everyone keeps telling me.” After rolling my eyes, I continue. “It doesn’t matter. We were already broken up back then, only I was dumb enough to believe it was fake.”

“It was fake. Technically, we never broke up.”

Shaking my head at the audacity of the man, I remark as evenly as I can manage, “You’re so full of shit your eyes have turned brown. You texted me after the concert to tell me to move on… told me that’s what you were doing too.”

For a drawn-out moment, Zeke stares at me like I’m a stranger.

Maybe I am?

I’m definitely not the woman he left behind.

Slash, Nadia, Crystal, my brothers... everyone did their best to patch me up in the wake of Zeke’s abandonment. I had support, until he returned from Sydney to banish me from the compound, and I lost that too. The past six months have been the hardest of my life—and that’s saying something considering the carnage that was wrought by Alex on the night of my eighteenth birthday.

At the crux of it, Zeke leaving broke something inside me.

Almost as much as Slash’s declaration of love permanently changed me.

“We didn’t end,” my ex-fiancé denies a second time. “Not officially. Everyone knows text doesn’t count.”

For a heartbeat, I just stare at him with disbelief. Then, the anger that I didn’t want him to use against me, the hair-trigger temper that I’ve never quite learnt how to control, engages without permission, and I lash out at the man I still love. My punches are mean and indiscriminate. I pummel him as hard as I can. Chest. Face. Neck. Beating on him like an enemy, because in some ways that is what he’s become to me, I scratch at the bare skin of his throat, and violently pull his hair.

He takes my rage without fighting back.

And I purge every ounce of pain he’s caused, physically and verbally, as I scream at him, “I can’t think of a more official declaration that something is over than abandoning your fiancée after they’ve been raped and beaten to the point where their body is expelling their dead baby.”

With a harsh inhale, I breathe through the sharp pain that stabs me in the gut as I remember the pain of that night. The blood. The fear. Slash climbing into the shower and holding me as I broke.

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