Breaking Ties by Nicole Knight

Author:Nicole Knight [Knight, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wattpad WEBTOON Book Group
Published: 2022-05-25T21:42:53+00:00

chapter nineteen

Ava

I sat in the backyard with my legs dangling into the hot tub as I drank my coffee. No amount of caffeine would help how tired I was, but it was worth a shot. Even with Nick at home, I hadn’t slept well. Every time I closed my eyes, nightmarish visions swarmed my mind. If I wasn’t replaying the incident at the park, I was seeing what had happened at Barella’s warehouse. In that moment, adrenaline had been pumping through my body, and I was in shock afterward. The only thing on my mind had been getting to safety, and I hadn’t really even registered what I was seeing. As more time went on, the reality that I watched eighteen women—eighteen young, beautiful women with their entire lives ahead of them—be slaughtered was consuming me. Could I have done more? Could I have saved more than just Ellie from that fate? Could I have talked Barella out of it if I had stayed there?

The questions I had were overwhelming, and I knew what Nick’s reaction would be if I spoke them aloud, so I kept most of what I was thinking to myself. I humored him and set up a meeting with my therapist, but I was dreading it. Therapy was nothing new to me. I’d seen several people while I was in rehab, and then again when everything happened with my dad. In my mind, I knew it was healthy and cathartic, but that was only when you could be totally honest with your counselor. It wasn’t like I could walk in there and tell him I had gone undercover working with my husband, was attacked myself, and then witnessed eighteen other women be executed before narrowly making it out alive. I’d have to make up some kind of cover story, and nothing I thought of could do justice to what I was feeling. I would come out of this looking as crazy as I felt, and in the end, it would just be a formality because we’d never get to the actual problem.

Nick mentioned sending his men to a therapist sometimes, and I would probably have a little more freedom in talking to her, but I didn’t like that option either. Even if she was an actual therapist, she was on Nick’s payroll, and anything I said would probably get back to him. Wasn’t the whole point of this to talk about things that I didn’t want to talk to him about?

Barella consumed me; he was wound so tightly in my mind now that he was all I could think about. The fact that I couldn’t move on only made me feel like a failure, and I never wanted Nick to see me that way. Throughout our entire relationship, he’d always been my protector. We’d come so far together, and this was the first time that I had ever been involved with one of his cases. Admitting that I needed him to pull me out again felt like ten steps backward, and it was tough to swallow.

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