Page 49 of The Damaged Billionaire's Obsession
“I’m always nice!”
“Of course you are, Bonnie. Of course you are.”
Chapter 14
Bonnie
The insistent buzzing ofmy phone wakes me up, but it stops before I can blink awake. It’s dark outside.
What time is it?I check the digital clock on the bedside table. 5:23 a.m. I reach across for my phone to see three missed calls.
Twiggy.
Okay. What could be the problem?
Immediately, the phone starts to ring again, and I accept the call.
“Hey, Twiggy,” I croak. “Where’s the fire, do you know what time it is?”
“Time to be wide awake, lass. It's half-ten.”
“Yeah, well, congrats, but it’s ungodly early here. Next time, let me wake up first.”
Twiggy is one of the two bridges between my past and present. The other person who knew me in the past and is still in my life today is my nan.
“Come on, Twiggy, what’s this about?”
“Yer nan and I just got back from the hospital, and she’s askin’ to have a word before I head back to Dublin.”
I sit up straight. “What’s happened to Nan?”
“Oh, she caught the flu, and it just knocked her about more than she expected. Happened to be passin’ by yesterday and didn’t like the state of her, so took her straight in. But she’s had some treatment and is on the mend now.”
My eyes fill with tears. “Twiggy…” Nan is as much his grandmother as mine.
My debs scandal rocked the Sect, and the news went around the school. After three months of punishment, of being despised and ridiculed by my parents and being called Slutty Siobhán by my peers, I broke.
I ran away from my home in Limerick to my grandmother in Clonmel, where I finally self-destructed and turned to the streets. I needed to destroy everything that reminded me of the past.
I’d met Twiggy, and we bonded over the hardship of street life. My grandmother loved me unconditionally, and her doors and heart were always open, however bad things got. Something I never got from my own parents.
Nan loved Twiggy and me through our time of using drugs, engaging in petty theft, and when we eventually cleaned up our act.
If you could call black hat hacking cleaning up, that is.
Twiggy, whose real name is Silas, is five years older than me, and although he was an addict and a thief, too, he appointed himself as my protector since the day he saved me from being beaten up by a few rough guys for running my mouth.
He’d been a computer genius until he was introduced to drugs by his boyfriend, and he'd got out of control and ended up homeless on the streets.
Even while we were hungering for our next hit, he’d always talk about scraping up enough money to get a decent computer and how he’d become a millionaire if that ever happened.
I used to think it was the drugs talking, but somehow, he got himself into rehab and his sponsor gave him a laptop.
Within weeks, he was making money, and he dragged me too, into rehab and made me stay clean.
Then came the hard part. He wanted to move to Dublin, and I had no money, job, or prospects. I was still needing daily treatment, even though I was coming to the end of my rehab.
He couldn't understand why I wouldn't let him support me. I'd taken everything he had to give when he was dirt poor. Now that he was making a lot of money, I couldn't take anything more.