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The Promise She Broke
The Promise She Broke
Penulis: Lovelicious

Chapter 1

Penulis: Lovelicious
When Helena Ashbourne pushed the door open, she brought in the faint smell of tobacco.

Her eyes landed on the fresh bandage around my wrist, and her brow creased.

"Gabriel, I'm gone five minutes and you still find a way to make trouble for me."

She reached for the bandage as she spoke, every movement thick with impatient disgust.

I pulled my hand back on instinct and cradled it against my chest.

"Someone already bandaged it for me."

Helena's hand froze in midair, and the look she gave me slowly filled with exhaustion.

In the beginning, when I told her someone was protecting me, she only thought I was getting worse, and she'd hold me tight with red-rimmed eyes.

Now my endless suffering was just a weight she couldn't put down.

"There's nobody here. Gabriel, how much longer are you going to lie to me?"

She grabbed my wrist before I could answer.

My shaking didn't make her gentler. If anything, her grip tightened, like a punishment.

She peeled the bandage off my skin, tearing the scab away with it.

Cold sweat broke out all over me, but I still held the wound out toward her and forced the words out.

"I haven't lied to you since I was fifteen. You know that..."

Something in my broken expression seemed to remind her of something. Her eyes darted away, and she turned to go.

"What about you? Have you ever lied to me?"

I threw the question at her back, and my nose started to sting.

Helena went rigid where she stood.

She wouldn't turn around, and she didn't answer.

Helena at sixteen had never been any good at lying.

Helena at thirty let her silence answer for her.

A few seconds later, she snapped toward the hallway.

"Delia, take every knife in this house and destroy them!

"If I ever see one in Mr. Sloane's hand again, you can find another job."

Delia Polk came in with a mop, muttering under her breath as she gathered up the knives.

"When is this illness of his ever going to end? Poor Ms. Ashbourne, everything she's had to put up with."

Put up with?

I looked at the thin line of blood winding down my wrist and opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Helena, you don't love me anymore.

So why won't you let me go? Why keep dragging this out until it kills us both?

I was still turning that over when her assistant, Damon Cross, walked into the house without even changing his shoes.

He behaved like he owned the place, reaching up to smooth the collar she'd pulled out of place.

Even with blood all over the floor, his expression stayed gentle and perfectly polite.

"Mr. Sloane, if you're lucid right now, let Ms. Ashbourne go. It hurts the rest of us just to watch her."

He pretended to step closer as he said it.

The faint tobacco smell Helena had carried in grew stronger, and my stomach turned over.

I doubled over and retched.

Half blind, I reached out and tried to catch the hem of Helena's pants.

My fingers had barely touched the fabric when Damon suddenly clutched his stomach and staggered.

Helena saw me moving toward her and shoved me away without thinking.

I landed hard on the floor. The wound on my wrist dragged across the rough carpet, and another wide smear of red bloomed under it.

"Is it your stomach again? I'll take you to the hospital."

The two of them left with their arms around each other.

Before the door closed, Helena glanced back at me.

The light was behind her, so I couldn't see her face, but I understood her eyes.

It was relief, the look of someone who'd finally set down a weight she'd been chained to for years.

Our love was over. Hers was only starting.

Maybe Delia was right. Maybe being with me really had been more than Helena could bear.

And as I thought it, the girl in the school uniform appeared in front of me again.

She looked at me, tears falling one after another. She wanted to touch me and didn't dare.

Her fingers trembled in the empty air.

"Gabriel, you're the best boy I've ever known. Leave her."

I lifted my hand and covered the girl's eyes without ever quite touching them.

My palm met nothing but a cool, empty chill.

"I'll go with you."

As the suffocation closed over me, I felt myself fall into somebody's arms.

Only there.

Only Helena at sixteen.

Only she would ever love me.

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  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 10

    Winter in Mist Harbor always came with more rain than anything else.There was none of Crownstead's gilded excess here, and none of the gossip that used to choke me.I had on a heavy cream cashmere coat, and I was carrying a bunch of chamomile I'd just picked up at the market.The flowers were small and beaded with rain, and they matched the way I felt.A mild kind of quiet.I walked into an old tavern at the end of a lane.There was a fire going in the hearth, oak crackling under the sound of a slow fiddle, and the warmth wrapped around me the second I was through the door.I breathed it deep into my lungs and felt a little more of the cold that used to live in my bones get pushed out.There was a time my hands shook too hard to hold a fork. Now I was greeting the round little owner like I'd done it a hundred times."The usual. Hot milk, no sugar."Nora Kessler handed it over with a smile and mentioned it in passing."By the way, that woman from Crownstead came by again tod

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 9

    The air went dead for a full half minute.Celia shut her eyes, pulled in a long breath, and finally, reluctantly, took half a step back.She pulled away from Helena's still-shaking hand with open disgust."You are pathetic, Helena."The brutality had gone out of Celia's voice. What was left came out flat."Now you know what pain is? Now you know what regret is?"When he was begging you in that psychiatric hospital to let him go, what were you doing?"Helena shook all over, and the tears wouldn't stop coming."I was wrong. I know I was wrong, I really do..."Celia looked at her coldly and took another breath."I brought you here to die today."I'd already had the hole dug to put you in."Helena's head came up fast, her eyes hollow.Celia paused, and something very complicated came into her voice."But my brother said..."He said to leave you alive."The second she said it, a flare of hope came up in Helena's eyes."Gabriel still cares about me, doesn't he? He couldn't s

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 8

    Crownstead's world changed overnight.Helena Ashbourne, the famous head of Ashbourne Holdings, vanished out of her own heavily guarded home.There was no ransom call and no ransom note.There was only one chilling rumor circulating inside Ashbourne Holdings: this had come from somewhere above them, and nothing could be done about it.An invisible hand had wiped away every trace of Helena and hadn't broken a sweat doing it....When Helena woke up, she was looking at an abandoned old building.The paint was peeling off the walls, and a cold wind blew through the rooms carrying the first real cold of fall."Awake?"A frigid voice came out of the empty space.Helena couldn't move. Her arms had been tied behind the chair.She struggled to lift her head and, against the light, made out the woman standing in the shadows.She was young, in a black trench coat.The instant Helena saw her face, her pupils contracted.The eyes, the bones of her face, they might as well have come ou

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 7

    Helena stood in the middle of the empty living room and looked around.Not one thing in the house had changed, and yet the place felt terrifyingly hollow.Every light was burning, and none of it reached the black hole at the bottom of her."Gabriel?"She tried calling his name.Nobody answered.Only the echo came back off the cold walls, and the emptiness of it was frightening.Days of holding everything in, of wearing herself down to nothing, came over her all at once, tangled up with the strange fragility and ache of being pregnant.Helena stumbled over to the liquor cabinet, looking for something to steady the churn inside her, but there was no strength left in her fingers. She had barely touched the bottle on the shelf when her arm swung wide and the bottle came down hard against the marble counter, and the liquor poured out across it.She couldn't hold herself up any longer. Her back slid down the cold face of the cabinet until she was sitting limp on the floor, holding w

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 6

    It was the third day since Gabriel disappeared.Helena had nearly turned all of Crownstead upside down looking for him.She pulled every connection the Ashbournes had and burned through enormous favors to get lawful checks run on the transportation systems.Airports, rail terminals, highway exits, even every camera around the psychiatric facility from that night.There wasn't a single record of him anywhere.The man the black-clad team had carried out was like a drop of water going into the ocean. He was gone without a trace.Only then did the fear finally catch up with her and set her heart pounding.It was as though somebody had cut a piece out of it while she was still alive and left a hole that wouldn't stop bleeding.In her office, the skin under Helena's eyes had gone dark, the careful makeup was long since ruined, and her hair hung loose and tangled.She paced back and forth like an animal caged and going out of its mind."Ms. Ashbourne, we still... can't find anything

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 5

    As the dust cleared, the corridor lights sputtered twice.Then they settled back into a dead, sickly white.The girl's apparition, who a second earlier had carried enough fury to level the building, went transparent the instant she crossed the threshold.Like a handful of sand nobody could hold on to, she scattered slowly and finally sank, gently, into Gabriel Sloane's body.Helena stood frozen, her pupils blowing wide.A suffocating emptiness was still lodged in her throat.But there was no one in front of her, only Gabriel, unconscious on the floor.Only that badly warped iron door, hanging off its frame and ready to fall."That... that student in the school uniform. Did you see her?"Helena's voice shook, and she grabbed Damon's arm and wouldn't let go.Damon had already gone white with terror. He fought his way out of her grip, close to tears."What student? Helena, have you lost your mind?"That door blew open by itself! This place is cursed. I'm getting out of here."

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