Page 111 of Sweet Wicked Vows

I nodded without hesitation. “Let me make one thing clear to you. I will always choose her.”

My brother stormed out, slamming the door behind him for good measure. He was pissed, but I struggled to find a single ounce of me that cared. I refused to let him or aid him in doing anything else that harmed Evelyn.

Fuck revenge. Fuck whatever notion I had of retribution. None of it mattered anymore.

She was all that mattered to me.

She didn’t deserve the pain and suffering her father’s past would cause.

Usually, I relished in silence. No distractions, nothing to grate and bury its way under my skin until I wanted to rip out my own bones. But sitting in the silent office, staring at the closed door, I longed to be home with my wife.

Her laughter, her perfume, her voice—I wanted it all even if it was possibly for the last time.

Weaving my bike through the streets of New York back to the place that felt more like home than my empty apartment in Ontario, I tried to piece together how exactly I was going to comeclean.

The leaks to the media. Her father’s history with my own. The notebook her father gave to me. The very reason we got married in the first place.

There was so much deception threaded throughout our months together.

If I told her the truth, if I spilled every twisted and fucked up thing that I knew about her life and how it intertwined with my cursed life, would she forgive me? Or would she run and never look back?

Was I ready to lose her forever?

Opening the front door, I knew something was wrong in an instant.

It was bizarre. Standing there, keys in my hand, the unsettling sensation that something was amiss crawled up onto me and sank its claws into the base of my spine.

Poppy’s singing didn’t flitter through the house. The purring bundle of fluff didn’t saunter from my office and rub itself all over my legs like normal.

There was a coldness. An emptiness that wasn’t there before.

“Douceur?” I called out.

Nothing.

“Evelyn?”

My steps echoed throughout the house. The silence nipped at my exposed flesh. Checking the kitchen, I found nothing. Up the stairs to my bedroom, I found only an empty bed. Knocking on the bathroom door, no one replied. I paced to her office where her laptop was no longer sitting on her desk and several books were missing from the bookshelves.

Stay calm.

Stopping outside her bedroom, I braced myself for what I knew deep down I was going to find.

The room was empty.

Fuck, fuck,fuck. Please, no.

Every last hint of her was gone.

Even the fucking cat I’d grown way too fond of was gone.

It was as if someone sucker punched me square in the kidneys. I fell to my knees at her bed, gripping handfuls of the duvet and bringing it to my face.

Her scent still lingered.

She was gone. She was gone.

There on the bedside table, folded so fucking perfectly that I wanted to rip it into a million shreds, was a piece of paper. My fingers trembled as I peeled it open, the sensation against my fingertips made me want to bite each of them off. Any hope I held for the contents of the letter plummeted hard as her wedding and engagement ring tumbled out from between the folds.

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