Page 87 of The Bonus

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“I thought the day you left me was your biggest betrayal,” he whispers.

You forced me away.

“Just because I didn’t want you never meant I didn’t want them.” He sneers.

Oh…

A knife straight through my heart. I stare at him through tears.

There’s the Gabriel I know. Cold and heartless.

“Here is what is going to happen,” he says in a cold and calculating voice. “Today I am sending a medic around to your house, and they are having a paternity test and you—” he glares at me, “—are finally going to do the right thing by your children.”

I open my mouth to say something.

“If you try to stop me from seeing them…even once. Prepare yourself for the consequences. Do you understand me?” he growls.

“Is that a threat?”

“Push me and find out.”

My stupid eyes fill with tears of fear. “You haven’t changed, still the self-centered bastard who only thinks of himself.”

A trace of a smirk crosses his cold, hard gaze. “I think you know me well enough, Grace, to know why I’m angry.”

“You didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“This has nothing to do with you,” he spits. “I have missed six years of my children’s life. Six birthdays. Six Christmases, six fucking years, Grace.”

My stomach twists, I’m on the edge of a full emotional meltdown.

“Do the paternity test,” he warns.

“And if I don’t?”

“Prepare yourself.”

My eyes hold his. “For what?

“Armafuckinggeddon.” He stands, and without another word, walks out of my office. I stare at the back of the door he just left through.

Oh no…

Emotion takes over, and I put my head into my hands and cry.

I sit in my car around the corner from my house as I try to pull myself together.

I was so rattled that I had to leave work, I told them that I had just been told an old friend had died.

I’m just a dirty liar now.

My eyes are red and swollen, and damn it, I feel so unstable.

Terrified.

His words come back to me: “If you try to stop me from seeing them…prepare yourself for the consequences.”

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