Page 5 of Sharp Lies

“Are you calling me insane?” he growled.

“No!” I gasped. “I’m just saying there’s nothing going on between Leo and me. I barely even know him!”

His eyes went from narrow to wide and terrifying, and he jerked me forward, then slammed me back. My back bent around the counter, and my head hit the cupboard behind me, sending stars bursting through my vision. I screamed out, half in shock and half in pain, and he grinned wildly at me.

What the—? He looked insane.

A quick move and he slammed me backward again, and this time it hurt so badly that I slipped and went to the ground. He let me fall and stood over me, staring down at me like he’d had every right to do what he’d just done.

“Tony, please,” I sobbed. “You’re hurting me.”

“That’s what you get, slut,” he ground out.

He whirled around and left before I could answer him—not that I’d know what to say—and seconds later I heard the sound of the door closing behind him.

He’d left the house.

He’d left me alone.

Blackness was pressing in from the edge of my vision, and I could feel my stomach flipping around like it didn’t fit right. I was about to pass out. The pain was too much. I was probably bleeding in my brain.

But I needed help. I needed someone to get here and save me.

I turned and looked for my phone, panicking at the thought that I didn’t know where I’d last seen it. But it was right there on the counter, the case bright orange. I pulled myself toward it and reached up, my fingers grasping for the device. Please let me get it. Please let me get it. I wanted my mother.

I wanted someone to come help me.

I finally got my fingers around it and pulled it down to me. Opening it up, I hit the first number on the list and then lay down on the floor. The phone rang once, twice, and then connected.

“Mom,” I whispered. “I need you.”

And then everything went black.

CHAPTER 3

LILY

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WHEN I OPENED MY EYES again, I saw white.

And I mean everything was white. The walls, the ceiling. There was a white curtain around the bed in which I was lying, and when I looked down, the sheets were... white. The rough nightgown I was wearing? Also white.

I frowned, confused. I liked bright colors. Pink and orange, yellow and red. I would never choose this much white in one place. Where on earth...

Then I heard the beeping. I looked over to see a machine sitting next to my bed, with lines and code running across a screen, and then looked down to see that it was hooked to several pads attached to the skin of my chest. The beeping sped up as I started to panic, and my eyes darted back up to the machine in question.

Then I realized where I was.

I remembered what had happened the last time I could remember anything happening.

Tony. The fight about his friend Leo. The hand around my throat driving me back into the cupboard again and again. The phone. A call to my mother.

I closed my eyes and breathed out hard, trying to calm the hammering of my heart. I was in the hospital. Which meant my mother had found me—or Tony had come back, regretted what he’d done, and taken me to the hospital himself.

I really, really doubted that second option. Far more likely that my mother had come running when I passed out on the phone and brought me here herself, no doubt muttering the entire time about how she’d told me that Tony was no good and that I was getting in too deep with a man I hardly knew.

She’d been saying it since day one, and I’d blown her off, telling her that he wasn’t as bad as everyone thought and that she just didn’t know him well enough to see what a good man he actually was. She’d told me straight out that good men didn’t come into town and try to buy up all the available real estate while refusing to tell the town’s board what they were up to. Good men didn’t rent a house outside of town and start taking meetings with all sorts of suits who never bothered to talk to the people who actually lived there.