“Abigail is not the sweet girl you make her out to be, Theo Hound. I thought you knew that most of all.” She didn’t bother stopping the blood. It dripped onto the photos. “When she was eleven, she skinned her own knee to get my affection. When she was twelve, she bled through her party dress and started a scene. When she was fifteen, well…” Her eyes pinned me, Abigail’s fifteen-year-old attention grab. “What makes you so certain Abigail isn’t behind this?”
Tansy left me with that question; however, she took a few of the photos and notes. I stared at the closed doors, hoping she would at least look into it.
Whoever he was, he had money and power. This went beyond some crazed fan’s imagination. He had the means to make fantasy a reality.
The most chilling part about it was that every letter is signed off your beloved. The photos are written alongside letters as if he was there with her, two couples going shopping together, or going for ice cream on a date.
It’s clearly a love letter, so what will happen if he can’t make the fantasy a reality? If it all comes crashing down?
Abigail was already starting to sit up when I got back. I went to her side, pressing her chest and telling her to lie down.
She pressed a hand to her head. “What happened?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You were drugged—”
Abigail cut me off with a gasp. I thought it was about her being fucking drugged, but then her eyes widened on me, soft fingers coming to my split lip.
“Theo…” Her words were plush, almost as much as her touch trailing my cheek, down to the blood staining my collar. She tried to get up again, so I pressed harder on her chest.
She rubbed three fingers at my lip like she wanted to wash away the blood and pain. I shouldn’t like it. I definitely shouldn’t remember all the times she had washed away the blood.
“I don’t like you getting in fights,” she said, fingertips dancing lightly around the circumference of the bruise.
“Only for you, sweet girl.”
She lowered her hands, eyes down, working her now bloodstained fingers.
“Who was he, Abigail?” I asked softly.
She rolled her lips, eyes finding a gold-encrusted clock. “I need to get ready for France.”
“Paris? That’s what you’re worried about?”
“And Spain. Switzerland. I’m worried my siblings are packed and ready to go, and my mother is once again going to point out I’m not.”
I let her stand.
She walked around her room in a wrinkled party dress, clearly still disoriented. It tugged on my chest, and I wanted to help her.
I tangled my hands in my hair. “Who the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know. I was drugged, remember? Have you seen my suitcase?” She exhaled. “This isn’t my job… where the fuck is Story?”
“I know you’re lying.”
No one batted an eye when he had Abigail on his arm. There weren’t a lot of rules at those parties, but one was written in stone: only the invited were allowed. Some average loser fan wasn’t going to weasel his way in.
Everyone knew everyone, so Abigail knew him.
“Why won’t you just fucking let me in?”
She froze, looking over her shoulder at me with a wrinkle in her brow.
There was no reason for her to let me in, no reason for me to want it. Not anymore. Yet my chest still pounded with almost losing her, and I couldn’t get what she’d said to me on the boat out of my head. It was rough and raw in my voice.
She looked away and continued packing.
I fiddled with the bracelet in my po