Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 147545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
“What are you doing, Pritchard?”
He sounds tired of me.
He doesn’t sound afraid, despite my gun being pointed at his chest, and that kinda pisses me off.
Even now, he doesn’t take me seriously.
I take a deep breath, my chest feeling tight and panicky.
“Put the gun down,” he says, still sounding bored and vaguely inconvenienced, but he’s keeping his eyes on me.
“No,” I say, hating that my voice comes out shaky.
His dark eyebrows rise slightly, but the faintest trace of amusement touches his blue eyes. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re crazy, but not that crazy.” He smirks, and my heart flutters with nerves. He shouldn’t be so calm. What an asshole that he can’t even react appropriately now.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t have to go according to plan. I just have to pull the trigger.
“I’m not crazy,” I say, which I realize would sound more convincing if I didn’t have a gun pointed at him.
He’s still not afraid of me, though.
He sighs. “Look, it’s been a long fucking year, and I’m tired of this. Tell me what you want from me.”
“You know what I want. Justice.”
He smiles, shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s what you want.”
“It is,” I grind out. “I wouldn’t have put myself through all this shit if I didn’t.”
His smile persists, and he has the audacity to lean against the doorway, utterly unconcerned that my gun is aimed directly at his heart. “I can think of other reasons you’d put yourself through all that shit. None of them sane, but, well…”
My grip on the gun tightens, and my jaw clenches. “Stop calling me crazy.”
I’ve heard that so many fucking times over the past year. Never to my face—most people aren’t so bold—but behind my back, the gossips and keyboard warriors came running to his defense.
They know Timothy Walters. He would never do what I accused him of.
And, more quietly, he would never have to.
Because no girl has ever told him no.
“I didn’t rape you, Pritchard.”
His words are like a wrecking ball to my gut. “Yes, you did.”
A flash of memory comes back to me. That night on the boat. I’d been drinking, and so had he. A friend of his passed him a beer from the cooler. He mischievously pressed the cold can against my inner thigh, causing me to shriek. He laughed, opened his beer, and took a drink from the can that had just been touching my skin. He went back to his friends, and I stayed where I was, gazing out at the water with a little smile on my face, but I glanced back at him. Nina was sitting there in her bikini top and denim shorts, flirting with him like always, but it was like he felt my gaze. He glanced back at me, too.
I shake off the memory, not wanting to remember the horrors that followed.
This isn’t going how I wanted, and worse, I feel close to losing control of this moment, too. He wants to keep me talking. He knows if he does, he can avoid what I came here to do.
I can’t let him overpower me again.
My finger rests against the trigger. I have the power here.
“You asked what I want,” I say.
“I did.”
“I want you to admit what you did to me,” I say, refusing to lose my focus. “And I want you to be sorry.”
He has the audacity to laugh, and I feel my heart—which has turned to stone over the past year—crack and crumble as he shakes his stupid head.
Then he says the words that seal both our fates.
“Enough with the theatrics, Pritchard. The show’s over. There’s no one left in the audience. It was just sex—it is not that deep. Me groveling may be what you want, but what you need is to get the fuck over it.”
His callous words clarify that I’ll never get the apology I need from him, not even a private one just between us.
So I pull the trigger.
CHAPTER 2
CASSIE
The sound is so loud even though this gun supposedly has a built-in suppressor.
My ears ring in the immediate aftermath, and a shot of adrenaline surges through me, making my limbs feel weak and shaky.
I can hardly hold up the gun. I can hardly hold up myself.
It happened so fast, but Tim looks down at his chest. A deeper shade of red soaks through the material over his heart.
He stumbles back a step, then stumbles again.
His gaze hits mine. A fleeting moment of shock surfaces, and then he falls. I shudder as his big athletic body crashes to the floor. This doesn’t feel the way it’s supposed to.
“What the fuck?”
The voice grates on my fractured nerves. I swing the gun toward it because it didn’t come from Tim.
It came from the hallway, where a carbon copy of him emerged.
Torrance Walters.
His dark eyebrows are hiked up, jaw unhinged as he registers the sight of his twin brother bleeding on the floor, then swings to the girl who accused his brother of rape and tried prosecuting him for it.