Bound to the Fallen (Prophecy #2) (40 page)

“What you
gonna do? Go tell Gavin?” Dan took a few steps into my office; his fingers were still curled around the door frame. “And what can he do — if he wants to keep his job? You should probably go tell him, that way he can get pissed and come confront me. Then not only will his little fling with you come out, but I’m sure the hospital wouldn’t feel very comfortable leaving a man with violent outlashes on co-workers in a position such as his.” He paused and snarled his lips up. “No one would believe you anyway, it’s your word against mine.” Dan tromped across to his office. “Oh, and go ahead and tell your friend Adam what an ass I’m being. If he steps foot on my property, I’ll shoot him.”

My heart was racing
. Angry tears stung my eyes as I walked over to my office door and slammed it shut. Too much had happened in the past week. It felt like everything was imploding and that everyone was out to tear me and Gavin apart.

Later that afternoon
Gavin and I met in the stairwell.

Gavin leaned against the
metal railing and placed his left foot on the stair in front of him. He pulled his stethoscope off from around his neck, stuffing it into the pocket of his white coat.

“
She’s not foolish enough to try something again,” he assured me.

I looked at him a
nd threw my hands in the air. “I really wish you’d tell me who the hell it was. I’m so sick of secrets. I’m so tired of having to sneak around with you. You know, I have to worry that I’m gonna slip up and say something damning in front of someone else. I mean, how much longer are we gonna do this, Gavin?”

Gavin sat on the stair next to me and scratched his head. “I know
, love.” He sighed. “I really am sorry.

“Somebody’s eventually
gonna find out, and then you’ll have an
awesome
reputation.”

R
aising his eyebrows, Gavin leaned back against the stairs. “Yeah, I know.” He nudged me with his shoulder. “Don’t worry about my reputation. If falling in love with a gorgeous woman who works in my office is the worst thing I do, I think I’ll be okay. Honestly, who can blame me? Love doesn’t acknowledge boundaries. We could always just run away,” he teased. His smile faded and he rose from the stair. He dusted his pants off and said, “I’m going back up to my office. How much longer do you have for your break?”

I glanced down at my watch. “About ten minutes.”

He checked the stairwell and then quickly leaned down, pressing his lips against mine.

“D
on’t worry, love. All’s well.” Grabbing the rail, he took large strides up the stairs.

I sat there
, tracing my fingers along the grooves in the steps. The fine particles of dirt rubbed against my fingertips. I was contemplating on how many more times I should let Dan run his mouth before I told Gavin. I couldn’t go to HR; that was out of the question if I didn’t want to get Gavin in trouble. I knew Dan was right. Gavin would get angry and would confront him. I could just imagine Dan making a smart ass comment, because Dan’s superiority complex had given him the delusion that he was untouchable. I just knew Gavin would punch him right in the face and lay his ass out, and how would that look?

I
f I told Gavin about Dan, I’d have to be very careful about when I did it. I decided I’d wait until Friday; that way Gavin would have the entire weekend to cool off before he saw Dan, and if he decided to go confront him at least it wouldn’t be at work.

Brooke

August 29, 2014

T
he next Friday rolled around and everything had been extremely calm considering what was going on.

I had steered clear of Nicole for fear I would accidentally
rip her hair out of her head, Dan had left me alone, a week had gone by and Ashley hadn’t developed any type of strange rash in her mouth, and it didn’t seem that anyone else had a clue about what Nicole had done.

Ashley and I were walking back
to the office after lunch. It was overcast and unusually cool out. I pulled my thin cardigan closed as we stopped at the crosswalk on the opposite side of the street from our office. The wind howled through the tall concrete tunnels created by the buildings and blew my hair across my face. I brushed the strands from my cheeks as the crosswalk lit up.

Ashley and I took a step off the curb and
sirens wailed passed us. The police car screeched to a halt in front of our building. I watched as two police men jumped out of the car and jogged toward the building.

Ashley’s eyes lit up and grew wide with excitement. “How many days does it take mail to get somewhere?” She bit her lip and placed one hand over her mouth.

Realizing what she was thinking, I replied, “Three days.”

Ashley shook her head.
“Oh, well Mrs. Knight should’ve gotten the letter today then.”

We both darted across the street and into the building. As we got to the sidewalk leading into the large glass atrium I saw the elevators open and the policemen
hop on.

“Oh
, shit!” Ashley exclaimed as we ran into the lobby. She furiously pressed the up button. “Come on, come on,” she yelled at the elevator.

I was in disbelief. “You don’t really think
—” I glanced up at the numbers above the elevator the police had gotten onto. It stopped on sixteen. “Well, all right then.”

Ashley’s eyes looked like they were about to bulge out of her head
at any minute. The doors to the other elevator opened and we scurried on. Ashley slammed her fist down on the sixteenth floor button. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this!” She anxiously tapped her foot on the floor of the elevator.

The doors opened and we ran out and down the hallway.
We could hear screaming as soon as we approached the door to the hallway leading back to the offices.

Ashley
fumbled with her keys and unintentionally dropped them onto the floor. We both bent down to pick them up. I grabbed them and stuck them into the lock. Ashley jerked the handle and flung herself into the hall.

I could see the back of the
two policemen, but no one else. I saw one of them struggling to hold onto someone while the other one reached for his handcuffs.

A shrill and angry female voice echoed through the hallway.
“You stupid son of a bitch! How dare you do this to me? That girl’s half your age, you disgusting piece of shit.”

“Ma’am,” the poli
ceman with the cuffs said, “I’m gonna need you to calm down now. If you don’t stop trying to break his hold on you I’m gonna have to say you were resistin’ arrest.”

“And you,
” the woman’s voice snarled, hatred oozed with each word she spoke. “You slut, do you think he gives a damn about you? All he wants you for is something to bend over his fucking desk and stick his dick in. Who knows who else he’s done it with?” She paused and broke down into sobs.

The
officer reached over and grabbed the woman’s wrists. I could see auburn hair peeping out from in front of his navy blue uniform.

“Ma’am,
” he said sternly, “please put your hands behind your back. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”

Her voice became s
ofter and the hurt was evident in her next statement. “You had the audacity to come up to me and talk to me. You complimented me, you stood there and spoke to me knowing that I was his
wife
. You mocked my marriage in front of my face!”

I saw Dr. Knight step out into the hallway. “Miranda
—” He reached over to touch her arm and she violently yanked away from him.

“Don’t you fucking touch me
!”

I heard the click of the handcuffs as the officer slid them onto her wrists. They turned her around
, her face was streaked with mascara from the black tears rolling down her face. She looked defeated as they paraded her past me and Ashley.

Peering
down the hall, I saw Nicole standing up against the wall crying. A large, red whelp in the shape of a hand was rising on her cheek.

Dr. Knight placed his hand
to his forehead, shaking his head, as he retreated into his office. The door shut quietly behind him.

I stood completely still
, frozen in the hallway.

Gavin
was standing in his doorway holding onto a bottle of water. His mouth was held slightly open, and his eyes were fixed at the end of the hall. I looked at him as Ashley forced me down the hallway, finally reaching her door and shoving me into her office.

“Holy shit!” Ashl
ey exclaimed as she put her purse down on her desk. “I can’t believe that!”

“W
ell, did you expect that she’d be calm about it?”

“No, but damn… I didn’t expect the woman to come up
here
!” She pulled her phone out of her purse and started running her finger across the screen. A grin slowly formed on her lips and she cast her dark, brown eyes over at me.

I sighed because I knew she was up to something. “What now
, Ashley?”

“Oh, just to make sure that everyone knows what a c
onniving whore Nicole really is,” she fiddled with her phone and then set it down in her lap. “I’ve taken the liberty of tweeting the pictures.”

“What? Ashley,
that’s a little much, don’t you think?” I reached for her phone and she quickly yanked it away.

Ashley stared at me.
“Need I remind you that this is the same slut that tried to get Gavin to fuck her a few days ago? She’s getting what she had coming. Gotta learn that sometimes you just mess with the wrong people. Plus, you shouldn’t do anything you would be ashamed of, right?” She took a satisfied breath as she secured her phone back inside her purse.

I sat in the empty chair by her door and
slunk down. Taking my hand, I pushed off the wall, spinning the chair around. The chair slowly came to a stop and I rubbed my hands down my face and neck, and nervously pulled at the collar of my lavender dress shirt. I felt horrible, even though I hadn’t actually done anything other than tell Ashley that someone had come into Gavin’s office and come on to him.

I let out an agitated groan and
allowed my hands to fall to my sides. Slouching down in the chair, I mumbled, “Why is this place so crazy?” Shaking my head, I looked at Ashley. “Everybody here is nuts!”

As
hley puckered her lips out and then drew them in under her teeth, rolling her eyes at me. “I don’t know. Reality TV?” She sighed and then gave me a hurt look. “You think
I’m
crazy?”

I raised my eyebrows
at her, opening my mouth and running my tongue back and forth across the edge of my teeth as I thought. “Yeah, just a little.”

“Come on,
I’m not crazy.”

I cr
aned my neck out toward her and raised my hands to my temples. “Really? You gave a complete stranger a blow job to get keys to an office that may or may not have had ‘evidence’ in it. Then you got naked pictures of Nicole, sent them to the wife of the man she’s screwing, and now you’ve uploaded them to social media — and she didn’t even do anything to
you
!”

Ashley’
s eyes watered up. I’d never seen her cry before. Guilt overcame me as I watched her run her fingers along her lash line to keep the mascara from running.

I threw my head back
and it banged against the wall behind me. “I’m sorry. I know you did it because of what she did to Gavin.” I cut myself off because I really wasn’t one-hundred percent sure it had been Nicole that had come into his office.

“
I’m just still in shock about everything. You’re not crazy.”

Ashley
glared at me. “No, that’s not the only reason. I hate her...
hate
her, Brooke!”

My shoulder’s dropped. “Why do you hate her so much? I get that she’s a bitch, but you despise her.”

Drawing in a breath, Ashley pulled a tissue from the box on her desk. She blotted the tears from the corners of her eyes as she moved her jaw from side to side and pinched the skin on the bridge of her nose.

Ashley focused her eyes up toward the ceiling a
nd tried to explain things. “When I first started working here, me and Nicole hung out with each other.”

She
grabbed a pen sitting by her keyboard and started drawing on her desk.

“We started at the same time and
just kinda’ clicked, you know, like me and you have. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was crazy about Gavin. That was all she talked about was how she was gonna get him to fall for her. She was so obsessed with him.” Ashley paused briefly and directed her eyes at me. “I guess that’s why I never suspected anything.” Her eyes glazed over and watered up again. “When I started here I was with the same guy I’d been dating since my senior year of high school. We’d both just graduated college, he’d asked me to marry him, we were living together — and then I found out Nicole was screwing him.”

“What?”
I gasped in disbelief.

She nodded. “Yep,
who knows how long she’d been doing it for? We’d been hanging out for about three months when I found out. It was only about four months before you started here. I caught her sucking his dick in our bed. I’d left to go to my sister’s house. I’d bought all of these wedding magazines and was gonna look through them with her. I got there and realized I’d left them in my apartment, so I went back to get them. I opened the bedroom door and there they were. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, she was butt naked on her knees in the floor with his dick shoved halfway down her throat.”

“Oh
, my God!” I was speechless. I couldn’t believe Ashley hadn’t mentioned that to me before, but from the hurt and humiliation on her face I could see why.

“I wan
ted to kill her. I actually ran over to her and started choking her a little, but realized she wasn’t worth going to jail for.” Ashley threw the pen down onto her desk. “So, she likes to steal other people’s men. I don’t think she’d have anything to do with someone who was
actually
available. I swear, I think it gives her some kind of power trip. I figured she’s ruined enough people’s lives, it was high time somebody returned the favor.”

I had no idea what to say to Ashley. I knew how much it hurt to be cheated on, but at least Brody had the decency to hook up with someone I didn’t know. I couldn’t begin to imagine how sickening
it would feel to walk in on your friend and boyfriend together. I just sat there and stared at her. I couldn’t blame her for hating Nicole.

Ashley forced a smile.
“It’s okay. The guy was a prick anyway.”

“You know, this is all just too much. I think we most definitely need to go have some drinks tonight after work. Girl’s night. I’ll get Constance an
d the three of us can go unwind,” I suggested.

Ashley looked at me and nodded. “
Absolutely! We need that.”