Page 55 of Fateful Exposure

twenty-three

Selma

I felt numb.

Desensitized.

I know it was terrible timing, given the gravity of the present situation, but after hours of wallowing in self-pity and anger, there wasn't really much else to feel.

It would be hard to recover from this. Months of hard work and sweat had gone down the drain. I was a ball of spiraling emotions and a vortex of madness, boxed within the crumbling walls of defeat. Maria's comforting hand made my calmdemeanor possible. Her presence, and the fact that I was in Ashton's apartment, brought soothing relief.

In other words, I wasn't alone, unlike last time when I'd had to deal with something like this.

Maria eventually came to my aid, but by the time she arrived, I had already lost so much that I believed couldn't be recovered. But this…right now…was infuriating and tiring.

I didn't know what I did to Alex to deserve this. That my body was dormant didn't mean my mind was. Try as I might to understand it, his motive deserted me. So many crazy possibilities swirled through my mind, making me dream of hurting someone who some time ago meant the world to me.

Now, he was nothing more than air, intangible and, after today, fucking invisible.

The price of trust. How expensive it is,I mused.

I’d never been vindictive, but every bone in my body called out for revenge. I wanted to get him where it hurt the most, and because we'd been together for two years, I could actually say that I knew the exact place to hit; his ego.

I tried sifting my emotions, but I was failing epically.

Anger clung to me, and the hands of despair caressed me. I could voice out how mad I was, but what difference would it make? I could lash out and cry, but what good would it do? I'd alwaysbeen pragmatic, and my senses told me that the last thing I wanted to do was put my despair out there for everyone to see because then everyone would know that the blogs were telling the truth. I really was the pathetic, scorned designer who slept with her photographer and got pregnant.

While that was not too much of a burden to bear, my designs leaking was almost killing me. Who would have done such a thing? Those designs were closely guarded and on my work computer. Could Ashton have been right about the culprit being someone working close to me?

But no one had access to my computer, and the only people who had copies of the designs were the dressmakers and the patternmakers. I'd been working with them for years now without any issues. Was it possible that they turned on me?

I couldn't make a move right now if there was even one to make. Not until I had a bit of clarity to deal with the pressing issues, and not with this mind of mine clouded with emotions. I thought about my mother and how she must have seen the news by now. Was she worried? Did she believe the blogs that I was a whore?

Sighing, I curled my legs into me as I leaned against the plush sofa, wrapping the thick blanket around me. It smelled like Ashton, woody and spicy, and I inhaled the comforting scent, feeling my bones lax beneath my flesh. Yet my mind raged. I wanted to let loose and release all the pent-up anger inside me. I wanted to rein in madness. I wanted to pummel my frustration and drown my despair. But there was no way to do that without drowning further into depression. If I let all these ragingemotions loose, I was scared I would never be able to go back to normal.

For someone who barely knew how to hide her emotions, I was doing my best to conceal the darkness inside me, one that threatened to unravel.

I'd been in this industry long enough to know that people never bounced back from this kind of knockdown. Instead, the media would do everything in their power, if someone was willing to listen, to keep their victim down. Whether or not the rumors were true didn't matter. What mattered was that someone was going down, and it wasn't them. So they would milk it for all it was worth.

Why?That was the very word I wanted to ask Alex. Why? I had never made a move against him, not even after the first stunt he pulled on me with my cousin. Family.

The word laughed at me.

People always said blood was thicker than water. Bullshit. That phrase had been terribly misquoted by fuckheads who wanted to satisfy their familial guilt. The correct phrase is that the “blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," meaning that the relationships one chooses to make are far more important than those they do not choose.

I did not choose Iris as my family. While we had never been close despite our mothers being sisters, at least there was never any animosity between us—or so I thought.

It was why her betrayal had hurt way more than Alex's. She had been my family, and I expected better.

Not anymore. They can both fuck off to the ends of the earth and die there for all I care.

For the most part, my breathing had stilled, but my joints were weak. I wanted to close my eyes and let Morpheus take over, but Ashton had left a while ago, and he looked furious. I didn't want to sleep without him around, and I also didn't want to think about why I wanted him around while I slept.

Though I was fast losing the battle. I could see a hazy picture of Maria sitting opposite me, her eyes glued to her phone as she typed away furiously at the screen, no doubt trying to do damage control. However, I doubted there was anything she could do to revive my publicly murdered image.

Unlike three years ago, when all the beating it had taken was just enough to knock me face flat to the ground, this blow was harder. Or perhaps I took it harder—probably harder than the first.

At least if these were rumors, there would have been a way to spin them around. I had people for that. But the accuracy of these reports painted me out to the public like a criminal, with the journals passing my sentence. No hearing. Just hard, cold butchery and condemnation.

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