Page 50 of Brutal Surrender

I don’t know where he goes after that. All I want is to sleep.

Which isn’t great because in my sleep, I’m back at home in Miami. And the gunmen are there.

“No, no, don’t!” I beg them.

They ignore me and unleash a rain of bullets.

“No, Bella, no!” I scream as I watch her bloody body fall to the ground.

The bullets continue to fly by, but they don’t hit me.

I fall to my knees and start shaking my sister. “Bella! Bella!”

Turning to the gunmen, I plead. “Stop it! Stop it!”

Pain, sadness and fear fill me, squeezing out the air. “No, no, no! Not again!”

I see bullets heading toward me, but they don’t pierce me. I feel a set of arms around me. Are they an invisible shield protecting me?

“No, no!” I continue to sob.

“Hey, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

Who’s saying that?

“No…” I groan. My sister, my family…

“Shhh. It’s okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

I feel the pressure inside me fade. I can breathe better.

“You’re okay… You’re okay.”

The nightmare ends, and the rest of my sleep is blackness.

When I wake, my room is quiet. Vincent is gone. The clock on the bedside table shows that it’s a quarter past eight in the morning. I sit up and reach for the remote that controls the blinds. That’s when I notice a bunch of pills beside the bed. One packet looks like a month’s supply of birth control. The other packet is labeled Plan B. Did Vincent have these placed here for me? It must be. No one does anything without his okay.

There’s also a bottle of pills. I read the label, expecting another birth control option. But it’s not.

It’s a bottle of omega blockers.

Chapter 23

Vincent

“You’re looking better today,” Ming remarks as he observes me shaving in my bathroom after my shower.

A part of me had wanted to stay with Ramona till she woke up. What if she were to have another night terror? She was sobbing so hard in my arms last night I thought she was going to hyperventilate. Luckily I had stuck around after she fell asleep. I think I had sat in that armchair for over an hour when she started to squirm and mumble. I tried to wake her at first, but that didn’t seem to work. She had opened her eyes but was still living out her nightmare.

But I have an early morning meeting at my estate on the island to discuss expansion efforts in South America, and I want to talk to Esen beforehand.

“The acupuncture finally worked,” Ming concludes.

“I didn’t have acupuncture yesterday,” I respond. I hadn’t told him that I had skipped my appointment with Suyin in favor of seeing Ramona.

“But my headaches are better,” I say. Not gone. But a lot more manageable.

“Maybe it was just a bug that needed to work itself out of your system.”

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