Page 45 of Ten

“It’s not what you think.”

“What’s not what I think?” His brow furrowed, and he crossed the living room to sit next to me. He gently took my hand. “What’s wrong, Nisha?”

“Marissa Lopez,” I said, choking on her name. “It’s not what they’re insinuating.”

“Marissa Who? What are you talking about?’

“These comments,” I said, shaking my phone in his direction.

“I know. I saw them. They're awful, and you shouldn’t read them. These people are idiots.”

“Yes, but Marissa—.” I stopped abruptly, suddenly embarrassed to tell him how horrible I had been. “She was this older girl who wanted Kiki.”

“Okay?”

“And I hated her,” I confessed with a sob. “She was always so mean to me. She made cracks about my weight, and my mom running off with a man. She made jokes about my dead dad. Just constantly, constantly tearing me down.”

“She sounds like a bitch.”

“She was. Probably still is,” I said, thinking that she didn’t seem likely to ever change.

“What happened? Why are people bringing her up in the comments?”

“I cut her,” I confessed, my head hung low in shame. “She slept with Kiki. I was fifteen, and I was stupid and jealous and so wrapped up in him. He slept with her to prove a point to me, that I was replaceable, and I freaked out and got so angry. She kept getting in my face about it, and I slashed her with a knife. Just swiped her right across the chest.”

The memory of the violent and horrible thing I had done turned my stomach. I shot to my feet and bolted for the guest bathroom. The pain in my leg made it hard to move quickly, and I barely made it before the dinner Ten had so painstakingly cooked for us erupted from my stomach. I shoved the door closed, barring him from entering, and heaved again.

Ten wasn’t about to let a little thing like a door stop him. He pushed it open and slid behind me, gently bracing my stomach and sweeping my hair out of the way as I retched into the toilet. When I was done, he helped me rinse my mouth and face.

I couldn’t understand why he was being so nice to me. He gently cradled me against his chest as I hid from him in shame. “Nisha, you were a kid who did something stupid.”

“I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have hurt her like that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” he agreed. “But you did, and there’s no changing it. You have to face it and accept it.” He rubbed my back, and I melted into him, loving him even more for the way he accepted me, warts and all. “How badly was she hurt?”

“Six stitches across her breast.” My voice was muffled by his shirt and chest. “I got it worse, though.”

“How?”

“Kiki took me to the back room of the bar where he and Adrian liked to hang out, and he locked me in the room with Marissa and six of her friends. They beat the shit out of me, and he egged them on, telling them I needed to learn my lesson.” I touched my left eyebrow, remembering the pool cue that busted my forehead wide open. “It wasn’t my place to question him.”

Ten traced his thumb along the scar on my eyebrow. “They did this to you?”

I nodded. “Kiki wouldn’t let me go to the hospital. He told me the scars would always remind me of how I misbehaved.”

Ten snarled in Russian, and I was certain the words were vile. “You were fifteen years old, Nisha. You weren’t even old enough to drive a car! How old was Marissa?”

“Twenty? Twenty-one?” I shrugged. “Older.”

“Old enough to know better.”

“I guess.” I gulped as the reality of my situation soured my stomach again. “But you see what they’re getting at, right? That I cut someone in a fight?”

He frowned down at me. “And?”

“Kiki cut those girls he killed. People think I must have known what he was doing. That I couldn’t possibly have been in the dark about the murders. Now, they know I cut someone who slept with him.”

“And it’s a big leap to accuse you of being the one who attacked and killed those prostitutes for fucking your abusive husband,” Ten finished with a scowl. “That’s crazy, Nisha. No one would believe that.”

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