Page 48 of Born Chaos
The woman smiles patiently. This is the third place she’s shown me today, but none of them have felt right. “I have one more to show you. It’s just a five-minute walk from here.”
We step out of the apartment, and she locks it up behind her. And then all three of us head down the elevator.
It’s icy cold outside, but I still feel… light. I went back to the church last night. I’d drawn a bath, and I’d had a good sob/scream marathon for about thirty minutes. At some point, I heard Roman come back. He’d lingered outside my door, listening for me. When I didn’t call him in, he went into his own bedroom and closed the door.
This morning, I’d stared at my splotchy face and puffy eyes, and I made a decision.
I wasn’t going to keep my life in anyone else’s hands. I was going to stand on my own, one hundred percent.
That might mean finding a new job. I wasn’t sure Sebastian and I would ever be able to be in close proximity again. Things might not ever cool off, and with this much hurt involved, maybe it was best to make sure we never saw each other again.
I don’t want that. I love working at the hospital. I love that I can be myself there, that I don’t have to hide what I am. I love helping other vampires and the gifted.
But if it comes to it, I will go to another hospital. Hell, maybe I can even open my own private practice and see only supernatural patients.
The other part of this is having my own place. Not in the Godfrey’s skyscraper. Not in an apartment that Sebastian owns. Somewhere to call my own.
“Look, I’llsellyou the apartment,” Elena says as we follow the agent. “So, it won’t even be mine. And then we can live close by again, and we’ll actually see each other enough that I’ll know when things implode between you and your fiancé.”
“Not my fiancé anymore,” I point out.
“Right,” she says, her tone hard. “That obsessed, greedy-handed creep.”
“Hey,” I say, my brows furrowing. We might be over, but I still loved that man with everything I had in me.
“I won’t apologize,” she snarks. “But you don’t have to do this. I’ll sell the apartment to you at a massive discount.”
“That’s the point, Elena,” I say, frustration rising in my voice. “I haven’t had any control since you brought me to this forsaken city. I was one hundred percent on my own in New York City. No back-ups, no couches to fall onto. And it’s been killing me how dependent I’ve been since I came here. I can’t do it anymore, Elena. I just can’t.”
She’s quiet for a moment. In this, we will never understand each other. To Elena, money can solve pretty much any problem, and she has plenty of that. She’s always trying to fix all of my problems with money, but she doesn’t understand that it’s just making the issue worse.
“I can’t say I totally understand,” she concedes. “But I’ll stop giving you shit about this. Let’s just keep fingers crossed that this next place is halfway decent.”
Ahead of us, the agent hooks toward a door, and smiles as she holds it open for us.
The building is beautiful. It’s old, with that classic, old Chicago look. We enter into a lobby that has a doorman waiting behind a big black desk. The agent speaks with him, and I look around, taking it all in.
There are plants hanging from everything. A big, classic chandelier hangs from the elaborate ceiling. The place is… old world feeling. I can imagine the gangsters who probably lived here, the ambitious businessmen, the women who were secretly vampires.
I smile as I take it in.
The agent gets a key, and we ride an ancient-feeling elevator up to the thirty-second floor, only three floors from the top level.
We walk down a hall and she inserts the key into apartment 32J.
It’s almost like a sign. J for Juliet.
It takes my breath away the second I step inside.
The floors look like original oak. They show signs of wear, but they’ve been re-glossed recently. Straight ahead, there is a brick wall with three cathedral-style windows set into it. They have to be eight feet tall. There’s a kitchen stretched out along one wall, all of the cabinetry black and surprisingly modern. An ornate chandelier hangs from the ceiling. Most of the walls are painted white, with a few black accents thrown in.
“Oh, wow,” Elena says, looking around at it in wonder.
It’s beautiful. It feels cozy and homey.
“I saved the best for last,” the agent says as she turns around, a proud smile on her lips.
“Yes, you did,” I say with my own grin. I walk further inside, already planning out furniture and decorations. I follow a hall toward a bedroom. It, too, has a brick wall and the same cathedral-style windows that stretch impossibly tall. I find an attached bathroom with a clawfoot bathtub, a shower big enough for two people, and a vanity big enough to contain even all of Elena’s beauty products.