Tears that welled from the loss.
The injustice.
The loneliness.
“You are the one who all but sold me.”
He laughed a disgusting sound. One that crawled over me like chills of revulsion. “You’re mine to sell, no?”
Bile ran the length of my throat, and I finally cracked. “Fuck you.”
Before I let him get in another word, I ended the call, and I clutched the phone in my hand like smashing it could grind the last seven years into dust. Short clips of air jutted my shoulders, and waves of dizziness spun my head.
What had I done?
I was supposed to go crawling back to Jarek to smooth things out for Logan, and I’d likely made it worse.
Stifling the meltdown, I forced myself to look up at the monitors, at the departing flights for the day, because I had to get it together.
They bleared over, the times and destinations morphing into lines of nothingness.
My phone buzzed, and I managed to read the text through the blur. One from my father.
Papa: Where are you? I was informed you did not arrive home on Jarek’s plane this morning.
I should make something up. Ask him to get me home. Crawl back on my hands and knees to Jarek and bargain my soul.
But I was frozen.
Unable to do it.
There had to be a better way.
There had to be.
I swallowed down the fear. Everything that had bound me my entire life.
What had kept me small and broken.
What had shaped me into a person I didn’t want to recognize.
What had chained me to a life I hated.
I let my fingers tap out a response. One I knew was a gauntlet. One that made Logan’s recklessness of last night look like child’s play.
Me: It seems your underboss has lost me in a bet.
Then I turned and ran out of the airport.
FIVE
ASTER
It wasfunny when you crossed a line in the sand and there was no turning back. When every excuse, rationalization, and justification of why youcouldn’ttwined together to form a knot of why youshould.
Of why youhadto.
Why you had to take a chance because you could no longer exist in the nothingness.