Page 100 of Borden 3

I shut my eyes thinking about my boy.

I needed to be smart. See what Theo wanted. Some of the things he said didn’t make sense, and I needed to get to the bottom of it. He claimed a rescue, and yet I had been whacked in the head by a gun and woken up here. No, he was a liar. He’d always been a fucking liar.

He’d breezed back into my fucking life all over again. He wanted something. Taking me in such a violent way, hurting me…

This wasn’t good.

After I choked down the food, I stood up and slowly crept out. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the scene in front of me wasn’t it. The large lounge room was homey. There were leather couches and autumn themed pictures on the wall. There was a fireplace, and it was lit, and on a shaggy grey rug sat Stasia, putting together a huge puzzle.

Lincoln loved puzzles.

The room was open concept. On the other side was a mahogany themed kitchen. The log home we were in wasn’t in the best shape, but it was functional and loaded with little kids' stuff. I watched Stasia for some time before finally looking over at Theo. Still shirtless, he was pulling baked cookies out of the oven. It was such a strange sight, seeing him hovering over the cookies with this concentrated look on his face.

He whistled. “Little flower, your cookies are done and cooling.”

“Yay!” Stasia looked up and went still when she caught me standing near her. Her cheeks went pink. “Hi Emma.”

Theo looked over at me for a fleeting moment—a mercurial look on him—before returning to his cookies. He placed them on a cooling rack and then took off—no word a fucking lie—the flowery kitchen mitts he’d been wearing.

“You eat junk, Emma?” he asked, that cruel lilt in his tone. “Or are you on one of those fad diets with the prissy gals you hang with with names like Octavana and Serephet?”

I ignored him because fuck this guy. I moved closer to look at the puzzle Stasia was putting together. I eyed her, trying to discern her. Was she okay? Was Theo awful to her, too? Her scars raised questions. I was disturbed by this whole setting. By the fact that Theo, too, was riddled in violent marks.

“My son, Lincoln, has something like this,” I said as I knelt to her level. “He loves animal puzzles.”

Stasia smiled. “I have a space one, too. Does he like space?”

“You know what? I never got him a space one. I should. He’d like something like that.”

She paused and, suddenly in a hurry, she looked into one of her toy boxes. Leafing through it, she pulled out the space puzzle box. She slid it to me, excited. “He can have this one.”

The space puzzle was cartoonish with animals in astronaut suits floating around planets. “Space and animals? I think he’s going to love that, but I think you should keep it—”

“Daddy gets me puzzles all the time,” she returned quickly. “I have millions…and then I have none.”

I was going to say that was really nice of him, until she said she had none, and now I was thinking this whole thing was fucked up. My mouth closed shut. Instead, I smiled like this was a happy fact.

“Cookies are ready.”

Stasia abandoned her puzzle and hurried into the kitchen. I awkwardly stayed in my spot, not wanting to look at him. My entire body still ached. My clothes were filthy, my shirt torn from when I'd been shoved out of the car. I glanced at a clock above the fireplace. It was night. I’d been here for hours.

I swallowed down my panic as Stasia returned with two plates of cookies. She set one down for me and, feeling his eyes at the back of head, I picked up a cookie and took a bite. Stasia kept looking at me, her eyes glowing, her smile curious as she watched me eat. I wasn’t sure what that was about, but the way Theo had pushed me to eat her food made me think that it meant something to her that I did.

She didn’t question my fresh bruises or shitty state. Lincoln would have. It would have been so out of the ordinary for him to see me all cut up. Yet to Stasia, she looked past that, like it was an everyday occurrence. That made me frown.

“Do you like them?” she asked me.

“The cookies? Yes.”

She shyly returned to her puzzle. “Wanna do this one?”

I wasn’t going to say no, but it was hard as fuck saying yes. So, I nodded. I mostly watched her put it together, the lump in my throat so heavy, I was going to choke. She was so fucking little. So innocent. Her green eyes would occasionally look toward me, making sure I was still there. I forced a smile every time, fighting back the tears swimming behind my eyes.

What had Theo done to her?

I thought of the kids we met in Neverland. The ones that were bruised and hurt and sad. I almost thought Stasia fit the bill, but she didn’t appear sad.

We put together a princess puzzle, and she grinned ear to ear, staring down at it. Her fingers brushed against the castle, and then her gaze settled on the cartoonish looking royal family. She traced the little princess, the father, and then she lingered around the mother. Her smile slowly faded as she stared at the Queen.