Page 154 of Freed
I can still see myself moving in a trance. Grabbing only what I needed. A few clothes. My passport. My phone. Photos of me and Sienna. The scraps of a life that had never really felt like mine.
When I stepped into the hallway, my legs had barely felt real. Lorenzo’s bedroom door had been open. Voices inside. Francesca and Cesaro, speaking in low tones I couldn’t quite hear. And there had been that moment. That one tiny moment outside the doorway when I could still have turned back.
Could still have gone to my room and chosen Lorenzo and the life he was offering. But then I had thought of Sienna. And I stepped inside.
“I’m ready,” I had said, though my voice was paper-thin.
Francesca had smiled like a queen receiving tribute. “Perfect. Do you know where you want to go?”
“I think… Los Angeles.”
“A city you can lose yourself in.” She had nodded approvingly. “Perfect.”
Something had twisted in my chest then. Intuition. Dread. Love. All of it tangled together so tightly I could barely breathe.
“Wait. I?—”
“Now,” Francesca had snapped.
The memory hits me so hard my knees nearly give out in the present. Cesaro moves before the word fully leaves her lips. Big hands. Strong. A vise around my arms.
“Wait,” I’d cried, but it had come out thin and useless.
Then the sting in the side of my neck.
My hand flies there now, in the present, clutching skin that suddenly remembers.
The world had tilted then. Blurred. Darkened around the edges like burnt paper curling inward. My legs had buckled, but Cesaro hadn’t let me fall.
Francesca had stepped closer, serene as a saint, one hand resting delicately on her bump.
“Don’t worry, Birdie,” she had said sweetly. “I’ll make sure Lorenzo never finds you.”
My vision had swum. My thoughts had scattered. My body had gone heavy and traitorous in Cesaro’s arms.
“Wait,” I’d slurred, reaching for something—anything—some final anchor to the life being ripped away from me.
But it had already been too late. The floor and ceiling had flipped. My eyes had closed. My whole world had narrowed to one collapsing pinpoint. And through all of it, one thought had survived.
Please forgive me, Lorenzo.
Because even then, sinking into drugged darkness, I had known what he would do when he found me gone. He would burn the world to find me.
The memory breaks.
I gasp and stumble back against the wall beside the elevator, the bright Chicago penthouse snapping back into focus in brutal pieces—glass, sunlight, pale floors, the faint scent of Francesca’s perfume still lingering in the air.
Oh my God. It was her!
She was the one who drugged me and had me thrown away in Italy. My breath keeps coming too fast. My chest aches. My skin feels clammy and wrong.
One of the female guards looks up from her post near the entryway. “Miss Miller?”
I can’t answer.
Because Francesca had stood right here, in this bright, beautiful cage Lorenzo built for me and looked me in the face and warned me about danger. And maybe she meant it. That’s the sickest part. Maybe she had come to save me from her father this time. Maybe she had meant every word. But she was also the one who handed me over before.
My mind won’t settle around either version of her. The frightened wife. The smiling traitor. The pregnant woman trying to save her baby. The woman who once helped take me from everything I knew. All of them are true.
