Read Online Her Secret Betrayal by Jordan Bell - Free Book Online Page A

slid down my cheeks and fell to my knees pressed against my
chest, indecipherable from the water droplets on my skin.
    A fist struck the bathroom door and I
screamed involuntarily before clamping a hand over my mouth. Quiet, Kara. Be quiet. Let them leave. Don’t give them fuel to
keep going .
    But they didn’t keep going. The silence
settled over the condo and I felt the emptiness of the room beyond
this one. I heard nothing for ten minutes, twenty. Thirty. Where
was Sean?
    Finally after I don’t know how long, I heard
voices in the apartment, then shouts. My name. I heard my name and
the pounding of boots on wood floor then muffled by carpet. I heard
the noise of debris being kicked out of the way and then hands on
the door.
    Sean. Sean.
    “Kara! Kara answer me now goddamn it!” The
door shook, the knob turned until it whined in defense. Fists like
sledgehammers broke against the wood and somehow, somehow I found
my strained voice.
    “S-sean? Sean!”
    “Open the door, Kara, it’s me. It’s me baby,
open the door.”
    I squeezed out of my hiding spot, my
swelling knees and aching body complaining the whole way. I
couldn’t stand, could barely crawl.
    “I can’t. It’s l-locked…”
    “Look, Sean, something’s broken off in the
lock. We’ll have to break it down.”
    “Move.”
    Something slammed into the door on their
side, bent the wood in towards me. I crab-crawled back into my
hiding space as it slammed again and again, each time splintering
wood a little more. On the third try the lock and wood gave, sent
splinters racing across the tile and Sean fell into the room.
Behind him Zach turned immediately when he saw I was naked and
ordered someone else I couldn’t see out of the room.
    Fury and terror made Sean wild-eyed, but his
body remained powerfully in control. I needed to see that. The
tears threatened again, welled from deep in my chest. His blue eyes
went from the blood smears on the tile over to where I hid.
    His breath hitched and he stalked to me and
fell to his knees at my feet. I launched myself out of my crawl
space into his arms and he swept me up into his chest.
    I shook all over, from cold I only now
recognized, from pain and fear and adrenalin withdrawal.
    “Shh, baby, it’s ok. It’s ok. I’ve got you.”
Sean buried his face against my neck and I wrapped my arms around
his neck and my legs around his waist. He rocked me gently as I
cried into his shoulder, out of relieve more than anything
else.
    “I should never have left you here. I should
have…”
    “Sean?” A girl’s voice appeared in the door
way and I felt him release one arm from my back and motion to
whomever it was. A moment later I felt heavy terry cloth fall
across my shoulders. Sean disengaged enough to try and help me into
it but I loathed releasing my hold on him.
    “She’s lucky they locked her in there,” the
girl said. Dani. I recognized her voice now.
    “Don’t,” Zach responded. “Not now.”
    But she was right. Anything could have
happened and I did not believe for a second there was anything
random about this crime. Sean had been targeted on purpose. And I’d
been terrorized for fun.
     
    ###
     
    “How does that feel?”
    “Ok.” Sean applied the final bandage across
my knee, clean of blood but swelling bigger by the minute. My right
one was almost the size of a grapefruit, the other bore only a
small knot but somehow hurt more. I sat on his bed, a robe covering
most of me but my legs. Beyond the bed a sea of ruin covered the
floor. Everything had been gone through, closets emptied, dressers
emptied. Beyond the bedroom I could see more destruction but the
police had that under control. Zach was talking to them. Dani
appeared in the doorway with two fistfuls of frozen vegetables.
    “Your peas, highness.” Dani curtsied
awkwardly at the bedside and I smiled at her attempt at levity. She
dropped onto the bed beside Sean, the only person he’d allow
anywhere close to me. She set one bag on a