Unlawful Temptations (The Star-Crossed Series Book 1)

“Oh my god, could you please go faster?”

“Kat, I’m going as fast as I can. My partner’s on his way there too.”

Dominic’s words did little to stunt the wild and painful beating of my heart as we sped down familiar roads, siren blaring, red and blue lights flashing. I was malfunctioning in every way a person could as we drove to my house. I couldn’t breathe, but I also couldn’t stop hyperventilating. Couldn’t move a muscle, but couldn’t stop fidgeting. I couldn’t think, but couldn’t stop the questions barrelling through my head that were pushing me to a quick insanity.

Who broke in and why? Was it random?

Why is Charlotte there and not with Mrs. Sharon?

Was anything taken?

Was anyone hurt?

“The lock,” I muttered to myself, fingers beating against the car door. The motherfucking lock that I was too goddamn stubborn to pay to fix today was the reason this had happened. My fault. My fault. Always my fault. “The fucking lock…”

“What’re you saying, Kat?” Dominic’s voice was even and firm, like he was trying to keep me alert and talking and sane. Sanity. What a goddamn joke.

“The lock!” My stare knifed through his as I exploded, panicked energy zipping through my veins. “The fucking lock on our front door broke this morning, and I didn’t fix it. I didn’t fucking fix it yet.”

“Kat, this isn’t your fault—”

“You don’t know that! This could be directly my fault all because I didn’t want to pay to get it fixed. Because I-God, can’t you go any faster?”

His lips parted like he was going to argue, but he tightened up his jaw instead. Gray eyes flashed back to the road, knuckles breaking white around the steering wheel as the speed of the car picked up.

“When we get there, you have to wait for me to go inside first,” he stated.

He sounded so serious, but my attention on him was muffled. I ignored him, staring out the window at the cars pulling over to let us by. We were getting close, and the closer we got to my house, the more my thumping heartbeat deafened everything around me.

All I could hear was my blood pumping. All I could feel was the terror.

Dominic called my name again, but I barely heard him, barely registered him at all as we turned onto my street. My house. It was there. I could see it’s dusty blue outside, the crooked mailbox, the weeds growing between the rocks of our makeshift driveway getting more focused.

My breathing escalated, drying out my lips as I shifted in my seat, hand resting on the door handle. We pulled up, and before Dominic could even set the car in park, I busted out.

“Kat!” Dominic’s shout fell behind me as I raced up the uneven driveway, rocks of gravel digging beneath my shoes as I tore my way up to my front door. Dread slashed through my stomach, bile rising in my throat.

It was open. My front door was jammed open.

I crashed through it in one frantic motion.

“Charlotte!” I hollered, desperation tearing apart my voice. My eyes tore around the scene of the crime. My home. My home that had been absolutely ripped to shreds. Terror fisted my gut as I screamed for her. “Charlotte!”

“Katty!”

A wild shriek echoed from down the hall that led to our bedroom. My heart jammed forward as wild blonde pigtails came running around the corner, her red blotchy face stealing the breath right out from my lungs.

“Oh my god,” I breathed, dropping to my knees. Charlotte slammed into me, and I scooped her up, holding her so close and so tight. I felt her warmth, her rapidly beating heart, her signs of life.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay.” Her mumbled voice, tears, and shaking breath all stuck to the crook of my neck. I squeezed her tighter, feeling faint from the rush of dizzying emotions.

I pulled her back a tiny bit, pushing my palm over her streaks of tears. “Why are you home and not over with Mrs. Sharon?”

She sniffled, dropping her swollen eyes to the collar of my shirt. “Mrs. Sharon went to the hospital. She said her tummy was hurting, and she was worried about the baby.”

Cue another tailspin of overwhelming dread. Fuck, I bet she called me too. My phone was back at Dominic’s house, still in my purse where I hadn’t touched it all day since I arrived at work. I normally checked it around lunchtime, which was right about now.

Behind us, the floorboards whined as someone walked in, and I spun to see Dominic enter my home. He nearly had to duck to not hit his head on the doorframe as he came in, eyes alert and hand resting on the butt of a black gun I hadn’t noticed before.

The sight of it made me recoil, tucking Charlotte’s body into my chest more. I hated guns, hated being around them, never wanted to use one. Ever.

In my arms, Charlotte tugged at my shirt to get my attention, not-so-quietly asking me who the huge man in our home was.

“Don’t worry. He’s a friend.”

Dominic swept an inspecting glance over my sister before bringing his tight focus back to me. “Is she okay?”

I nodded, smoothing my hand over the back of her head with a trembling breath. “She’s okay.”

“What about your mom?”

His question shook me, guilt sliding another splinter through my chest that I hadn’t even thought about my mom once. She was here. She could be hurt.

“Bugs, where’s Mom?”

It was as if I’d broken her heart with my question. Her innocent face broke with sobs, tears sliding faster down her cheeks than I could catch them.

“Sh-she left me, Katty.”

My sister’s sadness slipped and slipped down her face, and I simply froze. She sucked back a huge breath, her tiny chest shuddering with grief.

“I was out here drawing, and the man came in and started screaming at Mommy, and she started, um, crying and-and then he threw things! He threw my crayons and Davion’s book! She ran into her bedroom and left me out here…”

I couldn’t tell anyone exactly what I was feeling at that point.

It wasn’t a feeling I’d ever felt before.

I pulled Charlotte’s head down against my chest and held her there so she couldn’t see my face and how blank I could feel it had gone. Whatever this new feeling was, it was bad. It was a negative something.

Numbing and overwhelming at once. Still and violent at once.

Dominic was staring at me. I could feel it lasering into the side of my face, branding his pity into my skin ‘till I was scarred with it.

He might have known I was the girl with the junkie mom before, but now he saw it. He saw me with all my nasty little barriers torn down, shaking in exhaustion as I fought and failed to keep the walls of my world from collapsing.

My sister wept in my arms, crying out trauma she wouldn’t understand until she was older. All she understood now was that her mom abandoned her when she was scared, but she didn’t get why. I didn’t get why either, but I sure as shit was going to get the answer.

“Hey, Bugs?” I spoke in hushed tones against her hair, bouncing my knees to rock her like I used to when she was smaller. “I’m gonna take you back to our room, check that it’s safe, and then I’m gonna close the door, okay? Just for a bit to go find Mom.”

Hidden against my neck, she nodded.

She pulled her face back, and I used the sleeve of my shirt to wipe a trail of snot that had started from her nose. We started back towards our bedroom, and I talked quietly to her the whole way. That feeling was getting bigger inside of me, turning my veins over to live wires and my blood to coursing electricity.

I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t feel like a living, breathing thing at all.

I felt like lightning before it struck.

When we made it to the bedroom, I kissed her on the forehead, tucked her into my bed, and closed the door. On electric feet, I walked back to the living room.

Past the knocked over DVD stand with all of our movies spilled out, bills scattered over the floor, the broken drinking glasses that had been sitting on the counter when I left this morning.

I walked past it all and went straight for my mom’s room.

In the background, I heard someone else enter my cluttered home. Probably Dominic’s partner. I didn’t slow down to check.

My steps stopped in front of her door, pausing to listen in on the other side. I didn’t know what I’d find on the other side of this door, but I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I hoped it was brutal.

And not in the sense some might think. I wanted to open the door and see my mother knocked out on the floor, blood dripping from her nose or the back of her head or something to give her a reason. Some incapacitating excuse for why she wasn’t with Charlotte when I arrived.

Maybe if she could give me that, I could lie to myself and say that she was running back here to call the police to protect her child when the intruder got to her. She was trying to do the right thing, and she was just attacked in the process.

That was a scenario I could process.

Anything less and…

And I didn’t know.

“Kat.” Dominic caught my hand on the doorknob to my mother’s bedroom, folding his fingers over mine. “Let me check the room first.”

The muscles in my neck refused to loosen enough to look at him, so I just slipped my hand out from beneath his as a go ahead. Dominic slid his tall frame between me and the door so I couldn’t see what was on the other side when I heard the knob turn and click open.

The door swung open, but Dominic didn’t move.

His authoritative voice resonated in his back. “Ma’am, are you all right?”

For the first time in my entire life, I begged for silence.

I shut my eyes and prayed like I hadn’t prayed since my grandma passed when I was sixteen. I prayed so much for her to get better, and she died anyway. Faster than her prognosis even. Prayer had gotten me jackshit and toyed too closely to magic for me to trust it.

But right then, I prayed.

And right then, prayer proved that I was right the first time.

“I’m here,” her voice came, shaking and broken. “I-I’m here. This is my home.”

Inside of me, that something feeling surged forward fast and screamed. Its cries vibrated my blood, electrifying it until my limbs shook, my vision shook, my entire fucking foundation shook like I was a self-contained earthquake. That feeling shot me forward, pushing past Dominic into my mother’s bedroom.

And there she was.

Her brown eyes jumped to me, red-rimmed and sunken. Dark mahogany hair that matched mine in color hung in tangled strands on either side of her hollowed face, lips cracked and pale. Tears lined a clear path over her skin, giving her more color in her cheeks than I’d seen in months.

She was red with fear.

Crimson with boiling shame.

A sound creaked from her pale lips, something that sounded wounded and weak, and she stood from where she was huddled on the floor protecting herself. Protecting only herself.

It was at that moment that the feeling inside of me—that negative, numbing, overwhelming something—found its circuit… and the lightning finally hit.

For the next however moments, all I saw was blinding white.

There was screaming and sobbing, and on some level I was aware that some of the screaming was coming from me. I could feel it pouring out of me like lava, trying to incinerate the broken woman in front of me. My chest was hot, so fucking hot. It absolutely burned like hell, but there was nothing cold enough in all of existence to cool me down at the moment.

Suddenly, the sheet of white hot fury ripped out of focus as delicate fingers touched my arm. Reality came jolting back in a vision of sorry eyes and dark hair. Her touch filled my lungs with quick-acting fire, and I bucked at her hand immediately.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I spat and watched as my mother’s face fall.

“Katerina, please—”

“Why did you leave her?”

“What do you—”

“Don’t play stupid, Kathy.”

She recoiled from me in a flinch, face squishing together as she heaved a breath. “Don’t call me that. You know I hate it. Call me Mom.”

The audacity she had drew me back, my voice low and vibrating. “Don’t tell me what to call you. You lost that right. What kind of mother would leave her five-year-old daughter alone when a stranger breaks into the house?”

Her eyes rolled so hastily, I nearly missed the hurt that lingered in them. “You don’t get to yell at me. You weren’t here!”

“And if I was, the last thing I would have done was leave Charlotte alone. How could you do that?”

“It’s not like he would’ve hurt her!”

Shock filled the silence and my mother’s watery stare as she realized her mistake. I stepped into her—a threatening pace that stiffened the air.

“You knew him?”

My mother’s gaze dropped, darting back and forth over my chest. She was so washed out and thin, I could almost see her heart pounding against her chest as panic got the better of her. The fast beating of her heart and goddamn palpable panic invited me in, stoking the lightning coursing in my veins.

“He was here because of you?” I hissed, watching as she picked and plucked at the dead skin on her lips. A nervous tick I knew well and unfortunately got from her.

“I didn’t know he was coming…”

“Who was he?” Her eyes widened as I towered over her. God, she was small. All hunched over and pathetic.

“A-a friend. It was a misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding that ended with our living room being ransacked? What was your friend looking for, Kathy?”

She shook her head so fast, I knew she was ready with a lie.

“Nothing.”

“Did he take something?”

“Of course not!”

I relented despite her lies, my volume rising as my patience slipped. “Why was he here?”

The more I pressed, the more my mother began to lose it. She began rocking back and forth on her toes, fingers now in her mouth as she gnawed away at her nails. They’d surely start bleeding if she didn’t stop. Incoherent mumbling started as she shook her head, mist hazing over her eyes as she looked to me.

“I owed him money, baby,” she whispered, swollen teardrops spilling over. “I-I don’t know how he found out where we live.” Desperation streaked across her stare. “I swear I didn’t tell him. I didn’t. I swear. I didn’t. I didn’t…”

A heaviness sunk over my chest; an exhaustion I hadn’t thought possible hit so suddenly and hard. My body swayed under the draining reality of what her words meant. The horror it brought.

“And now this man can come back any time he wants.”

“He shouldn’t!” Kathy was quick to jump on that, inching closer. “He shouldn’t. He… should be good. He’s-he’s good for now.”

My lungs stilled in the following seconds.

Disbelief held my whole body hostage aside from my lip that twitched and head that ticked.

No.

Painfully slow, life pulled through my lungs just enough to ask, “What do you mean he’s good?”

My mother didn’t respond. Instead, more tears, more fidgeting, more lip pulling. That half a step she dared to take went in reverse, and she slowly backed away from me. Each pace she furthered, the quicker oxygen pumped back through me and the harder I breathed. Each step, my chest heaved wider and filled hotter, nostrils flaring and teeth baring.

“He came here for money, Kathy. You don’t have any money, so how is he good?” I asked, each syllable a pointed blade getting sharper and louder.

A tremble wracked my mother’s body, whimpers breaking past her lips. Each one made me want to rage, made me want to shake her until her ruined porcelain skin shattered between my fingers and spilled the words right out.

“Your shoebox,” she muttered, and I thought I misheard her.

I had to have misheard her, because she wasn’t aware of my shoebox. Not the one I kept under the kitchen sink that had all of my emergency money I’d been saving up for almost three years. Any spare cash I made went in that shoebox strictly for medical emergencies. We didn’t have insurance, and if Charlotte were to ever get really sick or injured, that’s what I had the shoebox for.

And I’d never told Kathy about it ever before.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Deadly. My tone was pure venom.

My mother was suddenly so serious, shaking her head at me like I was the one who should know better. “Katerina, I needed to give him it. I didn’t have a choice.”

A tiny gasp punctured the air, and it came from me.

“Kat.”

That was Dominic somewhere in the background trying to get my attention, attempting to distract my temper for just long enough that my mental strings didn’t snap. He was afraid I was about to lose my barely tethered mind on my mother right now due to her spectacular choice of words.

And he was goddamn right.

“Did you just say that you didn’t have a choice?” I began, disdain scratching my vocal cords. “That you had no other choice than to steal my money? Money that is for Charlotte in case she gets sick or hurt?”

“Baby, I—”

“How did you even know about it? Is any of it even left?” I yelled, my hatred peaking.

Or so I thought.

I watched her scramble for an answer, her eyes turning beady and forehead shining with sweat. She shrugged a pointy shoulder, not making eye contact with anyone in the room. “I found it a while ago. I don’t know—”

“That money is for emergencies.”

“This was an emergency!”

“You owing a drug dealer is not an emergency. It’s fucking typical,” I spat.

“Katerina!” My mother’s eyes shot wide and right back to Dominic. “That’s not what it was for. It was—”

“Don’t lie to him,” I snapped, cutting her off. “He knows. That’s my boss, and he already knows because your addiction haunts me. It fucking haunts me everywhere I go, and now he’s got a front row seat to the shit show that is my life.”

She gasped like she was horrified or even offended, balling her hands together into fists. “That’s not fair. You’re not being fair.” She shook her head, the water holding in her eyes turning bitter. “You have no idea what I go through every day… just trying to make it through.”

I jerked back like she’d slapped me, teeth clenching. “I have no idea?”

Considering I was the only person to stand by her side when Dad left three years ago and got VIP seating to the emotional, mental, and physical downfall of my mother, I’d say I had some idea.

“Do you hear yourself or do you just not care how you sound? I guess the answer is obvious though considering you left your daughter out there by herself with a dangerous man while you hid like a fucking coward—”

“I wasn’t hiding!”

Confusion bunched my face together as my mother and I stared each other down, and I tried to make sense of her words. Tried to make sense of her sobs that she muffled into her hands, and why her hysteria seemed to triple in the last seconds.

It poured through her fingers, seeping into her carpet tinged with mildew smell and crawled all the way up to me. Her hysteria knocked on my shins, clawed up my body until it found my brain and burrowed itself inside, realization dawning in a full body shutdown.

“Oh my god…” I breathed. “You ran to save your stash.”

There was no question in my phrasing. It was the truth, and even she couldn’t hide it. My entire body numbed. Thoughts dulled, hearing faded, taste soured, feeling flatlined.

All I could do was see, and what I saw was red. It edged in all around my vision, creating a ring of red—a ring of fire—around a woman who was barely even human anymore. She was all chemicals. Poison ran through her blood and altered her DNA to this thing in front of me that was no more living than weeds.

She was physically there, encased in flesh that was rotting from the inside, but she had no function other than stealing life from the sun and strangling the flowers around her.

Ringing. It had started small, a faint drilling between my ears, but got louder and piercing as the mindless weed dared to speak.

“He took it. All of it,” she whispered. “It’s been a couple days since I-I…” Her voice cracked, and then she did. “You know I’m not well without it, baby.”

The red was getting tighter around her, closing in a shade closer to blood with every inch. And the ringing, the fucking ringing was frightening. It got so loud, I felt like glass beneath it. The pressure was too much, bending my bones and heating my pores.

It got louder and shriller, stabbing at my ears until it consumed me. Until I was made up of the ringing and nothing else. Until it expanded inside of me too much, and just like the glass, I shattered in a hundred deadly shards under its high-pitched pressure.

I was moving before I registered it, a cry following me as I ran forward at the woman with the mahogany hair. The cry bled down my throat and sounded like torment embodied.

As if heartbreak had its own sound.

Coffee-colored eyes shot open as I came at her and shoved as hard as I could, watching with a grin as she knocked back into the wall. She crumpled to the ground, and I loved it. I fucking loved seeing her terrified and hissing in pain.

I was the lightning, and I would strike her again and again until she was nothing but ashes and tears.

She shrieked beneath me, and my fingers flexed, wanting to hear the noise again. I was uncontained, chaotic, the fever coursing through me too volatile to control.

My blood sizzled, fingers tingling, smile widening—

And then I was gone. Airborne, legs kicking out beneath me as a strong arm around my waist carried me backwards, screams pouring through my lips.

“Let me go! She fucking deserves it!”

My back hit a wall, eyes blinking wildly as nothing and everything came into focus. The hate was too much, too powerful, and I struggled against the brick wall of muscle that had grabbed me.

“Kat.”

Thunder.

The lightning quieted for just a fleeting second to recognize the thunder booming above me and its hands around my arms, pinning me back against the wall. I bucked in his hold, his fingers pressing deeper into my skin to keep me in place.

In the middle of a cry, the thunder rumbled right next to my ear. “Remember what you told me about yelling in the house.”

I sucked back a breath that stunted my next scream. The flashes across my vision quieted just barely, and the thunder used the lapse to talk deeper, sweeter. “I know it’s not even close to the same thing, but try to calm yourself.”

Thumbs ran over my arms, soothing strokes back and forth. Each stroke centered my haywire focus bit by measured bit. The lightning was still inside of me, pulsing and burning my blood, but the thunder absorbed just enough so I could see again.

And all I saw was gray.

Soft, cool gray that hovered above me like I was staring up at the moon, just as magnificent and other-worldly. My head lulled back against the wall, heavy breaths still working my chest.

“I can’t,” I whimpered to him. “I-I can’t calm down.”

“Yes, you can.” All of his attention was fixed on me, like he could tell I was too hot and was trying to cool me down with his winter eyes. “Breathe.”

I shook my head and stopped breathing all together instead. I couldn’t do it, even if it made me a hypocrite in the flesh. I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t calm down and didn’t even want to. What I really needed was edging in my throat, tiptoeing up and up with razor blades.

Eyes on him, my voice stole to a whisper one step away from breaking. “I need to scream.”

Dominic took his gaze all across my face, doing his indiscernible dissection. He eventually brought it back to me, settled his eyes on mine and nodded.

“Okay,” he spoke quietly.

A hand grazed up my arm to the back of my neck, fingers splitting into my hair. If I had the oxygen to, I would have asked him what he was doing as he anchored my body away from the wall and into him.

A tiny breath hitched in my squeezing throat as Dominic pressed my face against his chest, his other hand flattening on my back. His smell was everywhere around me, shoved down my nose that was smushed into his shirt and so potent I could taste him on my tongue.

He held me—and I mean he really held me—but I still didn’t know why until his lips brushed the top of my head with a single instruction.

“Scream.”

My heart jumped, startling me like I forgot I had one. I fisted my hands in the material of his shirt as soon as I understood him, as if I might have fallen over without him there. Something moved inside of me, and I couldn’t be sure what it was because I didn’t have time to think about it. There was no time because the scream was coming fast, shoving everything else out of its way.

Racing. Burning. Shredding me apart from the inside out.

My lungs filled with fire as I breathed back, the pain knifing up my throat, my fingers destroying the neatness of his pressed shirt.

And then it was out.

Dominic’s hand on the back of my head pressed down harder, swallowing up my scream against his body as much as possible. The scream bled out of me, causing almost as much pain as it was releasing. It hurt and it healed, and by the long-winded end of it, water had formed in the corner of my eyes from the sheer effort of it.

Dominic didn’t let go even as my scream faded, leaving me panting and raw on the inside. Only my heavy breathing filled the room, and for a moment, I wished I could disappear inside Dominic’s arms where the only thing that existed was his elemental scent and warmth.

I wanted to fill myself with it and float through the darkness, drifting along the current of him.

Yet, the weed across the room still wasn’t done sucking life and spewing lies.

“Baby, I’m so sorry,” Kathy sputtered. My tired muscles jerked. “You know I love you and your sister.”

Slowly, Dominic loosened his hold on the back of my neck so I could look up. His hand on my back disappeared but secured against the wall behind me, keeping a stiff barrier between me and my mother.

Over Dominic’s arm, I found her on the other side of the room, shivering and tear-streaked.

“You don’t love us,” I rasped. “You haven’t loved us since he left.”

“I tried! I—”

“You didn’t fucking try.” She shut her mouth as I lost it. As my voice cracked. As the monopoly my temper had over my emotions exhausted itself, and everything poured out all at once.

“You left us at the exact same time Dad did. Charlotte may not have been old enough to remember any of that, and I am so fucking thankful for that, but you can’t lie to me like I can lie to her. I was there. I remember all of it. I remember holding your hand through your heartbreak and then holding your hair when you puked it all up.”

A violent sob broke past her cracked lips, tearing tremors through her whole body.

“I doubt you remember much of the first year after he left because you were drunk through all of it, but I remember it. I was the one who found you and drove you to the hospital the first time you had to have your stomach pumped. I was the one who had to clean you up and put you to bed almost every night. I was the one who thought you’d died the first time you overdosed.”

I was the one to find her that time too, scared out of my mind because I didn’t know she’d fallen to drugs yet. One day, I was splitting her vodka in half with tap water, and the next she was gone to heroin. It owned her so fast, I didn’t even catch it happening.

She went from an abusive relationship with my father, to one with alcohol, to one with heroin. She was passed from one pair of noxious arms to another, and I watched it all happen until I couldn’t anymore.

“I watched you poison yourself because of him, because of a man who never deserved you.”

My mother shook her head, letting it drop into her hands as she wept.

“You let him take everything from you, and you never even tried to stop it because I begged you to, and you didn’t. I cried for you to stop, signed you up for classes to get you help. I loved you through it all, and it wasn’t enough.”

Knots tied around my throat as I kept talking, but I couldn’t stop it. The painful words were coming out whether I wanted them or not.

“Nothing I did was ever enough to make you want to be here with us instead of fucked up for him. You let me bleed myself to a husk for you, and then you left me that way,” I cried, voice breaking as my eyes welled with tears she didn’t deserve.

A shaking breath shuddered in my chest as my heart broke open. “You used to be so good. Even when times were shitty and Dad was being Dad, you were still trying to be decent. I used to think that if he left us, everything would get better.”

A wet, humorless chuckle pushed up my throat. “But then he did leave and you couldn’t handle it, so you threw every responsibility my way at eighteen, and I took it. I fucking took them on because you were my mom, and I loved you. I chose you over graduating high school. I chose you over going to college.”

I paused, a hot tear sliding down my cheek.

“But you never chose me back. It was always him. He’s always been your first choice.”

Grief I thought was long gone ripped down my chest, a heavy sob tipping out. “Why don’t you love us as much as you love him?”

The room was silent of everything but my choppy breathing. The look on my mother’s face was awestruck and wrecked. I’d never told her any of that before. I’d never told anyone any of that before.

I didn’t even remember I felt that way.

I spent much of the last three years since Dad left deflecting anything that hurt me because I didn’t have time for it. Surviving was just so much easier when I could forget I even had these feelings.

These weak, crippling, lonely feelings.

I’d forgotten Dominic was holding the back of my head until his hand relaxed to rest on my shoulder, and I tipped my eyes up to him.

My first reaction was to feel embarrassed. I mean, I still had tears drying on my cheeks and my broken heart bleeding all over my sleeves. That wasn’t me. I didn’t cry.

But I was just too exhausted to feel embarrassed right now. All I wanted was one thing.

“Can you arrest her?” I asked.

A startled gasp came from Kathy’s side of the bedroom, and my nostrils flared. Dominic looked so fucking sad as he shook his head. “We haven’t found any drugs on the property yet. My partner did a full sweep of everywhere but in here.”

“There’s nothing,” my mother practically choked out. “You won’t find anything.”

“But what about the break in? That happened because of her when a small child was home. Come on, that has to be something.”

Disappointment crushed his eyebrows together, his chest sinking.

“Most we can do is run a drug test on her. If she was on something when the break in happened, then we can get her for Child Endangerment. She can also give us a description of who broke in and…”

He kept talking, but I stopped listening.

His voice became sonorous background music for me to drift away in my mind to. I was so fucking tired from today, from everything. If he wasn’t going to arrest Kathy, then I didn’t wanna be here anymore.

“Do you need me back at work today?”

Dominic stopped talking, eyebrows curving in as he trailed his eyes down the wet stains of evidence on my face. Quickly, I ran the back of my hand over my cheeks so he’d stop looking.

His mouth frowned, and he shook his head. “No. I’ll text Heather and ask if she can stay home for the day and work from there.”

I nodded barely. “Excuse me, then.”

Dominic didn’t move right away. His hand stayed where it was on my shoulder while his other boxed me in. The look on his face said he didn’t want to let me go, said that he had more to say, but he never did.

After a second, he agreed with a nod and moved back, and I slid out.

I passed my mother, and I passed Dominic’s partner as I left the room, not giving either of them a second look. The only person I wanted to see was at the end of the hallway, curled up under the sheets of my bed.

That’s exactly where I found her when I opened the door. Her eyes were sleepy and red from crying, and I pulled the sheets back and snuggled up with her. Charlotte huddled into my chest and lapsed into a deep sleep in minutes while I pushed my fingers through her hair.

As worn out as I was, I never slept.

My heart was beating too fast for sleep. It hummed a tune too anxious to do anything but lay there and obsess over what happened, the possibility of it happening again, and the why of it all.

Everything that happened today stemmed from a broken heart.

A broken heart created a broken woman.

A broken woman created a broken family.

Love broke us.

Love obliterated my life before it ever really started.