Page 55 of Broken Princess
12
Logan
“Logan. Wake up.”
I peeled my eyelids open, painstakingly slowly. My mouth was dry as cotton and my brain felt like scrambled eggs.
For a few seconds I was convinced last night was a terrible alcohol-induced dream and Willow was right here next to me, coaxing me to wake. “You’re here,” I mumbled, wondering how much I drank to have a hangover this bad.
“Of course I’m here,” my father replied testily. “I’m driving.”
My foggy thoughts instantly cleared as the truth rushed at me like a bullet train from hell. This was no hangover.
I sat up straight and rubbed my eyes, looking out the car window as pain and nausea hurtled through my system. Sorrow had seeped into every cell of my being, cold and cruel, and I was drowning in it.
She’s gone.
I shut my eyes, picturing Willow’s face as the grief began to come in waves, engulfing me all over again. She was my world, and I never got the chance to tell her that. Never got the chance to give her everything she deserved for the rest of her life. Instead she spent her last few moments miserable and petrified on a stranger’s plane, headed for servitude.
The terrible thoughts tormented me, whispering darkly, cobwebbing and tangling in my mind, strangling my veins. I was so choked up I could barely breathe.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dad asked, turning to me as he waited for Wonderland’s main front gate to open. “You slept half the day and you look like hell.”
I’m in hell.
“Hangover,” I said listlessly.
After last night’s news, I never thought I’d eat or move or sleep again. I simply sat there on the bed in my suite at Lilith Hall, staring into space, wishing I could change the past or simply erase the last few months. Wishing I could steal Willow back from the jaws of death so I could hold her, breathe her in, touch her silken hair, tell her how much I loved her.
At some point it all grew so overwhelming that I passed out, slipping into a sleep so deep it might as well have been a coma. I only woke when my father roughly shook me somewhere around lunchtime and told me that we needed to leave the winery and head home because he had an afternoon meeting.
“Right. Anyway, what did you think of the place?” he asked as the gate opened. “Think you’ll book it for the wedding?”
There’s no fucking wedding,I wanted to shout. Instead I gritted my teeth and dug my nails into my palms in an attempt to steady myself. “Maybe,” I finally replied. “It was a nice spot.”
He narrowed his eyes as he pulled into one of our private parking spaces. “You sure everything is okay?”
I swallowed thickly. “Yes.”
I headed up to my suite on the top floor of Wonderland, eyes heavy-lidded and arms like dead weights by my side. I looked and felt like a zombie, making my way through the world on pure mechanical instinct, wishing someone would put a bullet in my head to put me out of my misery.
Was this the universe’s way of balancing things?
Was this my karma for all of the terrible things I’d done in my life?
The things I did to Willow, the way I threatened her brother’s life, the way I shot my friend right in the head… I had to be punished for it somehow, even if I thought it was all justified at the time.
But why her? Why take her from me? She didn’t do anything wrong.
It should’ve been me.
I pulled my arm back and slammed my fist into the mirror hanging on the wall near the bed. Pain flared across my knuckles as my reflection cracked and disintegrated into a hundred pieces, but I kept going, hitting it over and over until shards of glass littered the floor at my feet, speckled with the blood dripping from my hand.
“Mr. Thorne?”
A feminine voice tentatively called out to me from somewhere across the room. I whirled around to see one of the maids staring at me with wide eyes, clutching a duster in one hand. She had auburn hair, just like Willow.
Grief roared up inside me all over again, like a thousand icy needles stabbing at my guts. Everything would always remind me of Willow. Everywhere I looked, everyone I saw… there was always going to be something that made me think of her.
