Page 88 of Violent Attraction

“Hey, I made you smile a little bit at least,” Serena muses.

She’s right, she did, and it feels good since my smiles have been very limited in the two weeks since her kidnapping.

“Yeah.” I respond, just going back to drinking my coffee. “Do you want to watch a movie?” I change the subject before she can even start it. I head to the couch and grab the remote, with Serena coming over a few seconds later.

I end up putting a random Disney movie on, and we watch it without talking for a good half hour. But of course, the silence has to be broken by my sister-in-law.

“How are you really?” She asks, her voice is low and timid and definitely not a tone that I’m used to hearing when it comes to this woman.

I don’t answer right away.

How am I?

That’s a question that I don’t really know the answer to.

Is ‘I’ve been trying not to cry into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s half baked’ a good answer?

I’m promised to a man that kidnapped my sister-in-law and her friend and was going to kill them to get at my brother. And said man is also the man that just so happened to kill a man that treated me like his own daughter.

No rational, sane person would be okay after knowing any of that.

In a matter of a few weeks, I went from being optimistic about Santos figuring out a way to stop all this and getting him to break his promise not to touch me, to this. Being depressed and lost in my own mind and hating my father for not ending this arrangement the second that Serena was taken.

Which just adds more fuel to the fire of there being more to this arrangement than any of us know.

“I want to be okay,” I answer Serena’s question as honestly as I can.

Being okay would be a hell of a lot better than everything else that I’m feeling.

“Oh, Bella,” Serena scoots over and tries to hug me as best she can with her slung up arm.“I’m so sorry.”

Everyone is sorry.

I lean into her hug as much as I can without hurting her.

This is a little awkward for me and Serena, we don’t hug. Honestly up until two weeks ago, I didn’t like her very much. Sure, she was growing on me, but we weren’t at the hugging stage just yet.

Not going to lie, this feels nice. Like I have someone else that I can lean my shoulder on.

“I told Leo that I wanted to be happy like he is with you, but I think that there’s more to that. I want to be to feel safe too. Do you think that’s hoping for too much?”

Every woman deserves to be happy and loved and to feel safe, right?

Or is that not in the cards for me?

Because right now as I sit here, I’m going to be marrying Emilio in a few months and there is nothing I can do about it.

Unless he dies, which I’m a little surprised he’s still alive and kicking with the shit he pulled with Serena, I have no other way out of this arrangement.

“No, that’s not too much,” Serena pulls back from me and looks me right in the eyes as she speaks. “You deserve the fucking world and one day you will be getting that. I know that Santos will make sure of it.”

I give her smile a questioning look.

“Does everyone know that we were in a relationship for four years”

“The fuck? Four years? You two were in a relationship for four years?” Her hazel eyes go wide and her exclamation makes me laugh a little. I guess not everyone knew.

I nod. “It was a secret. Something just for me and him. He was going to propose actually, and well, that’s when all this mess started.”

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