Page 89 of Total Obsession

Maybe someone had hacked his phone?

Maybe his phone had been stolen?

But, the more and more my mind tried to make excuses for him, the more and more I realized that I'd fallen into this pattern of behavior before.

And now look where I was.

I thought back to our first encounter. Him showing up at the fashion show out of the blue after decades of not seeing him. It was like the moment Axe entered my life, things became easy.

Almost too easy.

The television show.

The apartment.

The fame, the money, the second season, the movie deal.

It was all just too much.

I started to hyperventilate. The idea that Axe had somehow been controlling my life and my career all this time kept floating in my head, and it was starting to squeeze the air out of my lungs.

What if that were true?

Why would he want to do something like that to me?

I closed my eyes and thoughts of our first day in high school flashed in front of my eyes. Could that really be it? After all this time, was he still really harboring a grudge against me for the way I behaved that day when I was just an insecure teenager?

Then a more sinister thought crossed my mind. Axe's father's death was always assumed to be from the fire, but no explanation for why the fire broke out was ever found. No one really suspected that a kid could be responsible, but Axe disappeared before he was able to be questioned. No one was all that interested in figuring out the matter. Axe's father was not known to be the best of men.

What if Axe had been the one to kill his father?

What if since that time, he'd only continued on that path? Killing people who he felt deserved it.

I thought about the private jet.

I thought about Miami.

I thought about his "job," the one he never wanted to talk about.

I ran to the bathroom and promptly hurled up what little food I had in my stomach.

I didn't have a shred of evidence that what I was thinking was actually the truth, but somewhere deep down inside of me I knew that it was.

A knock on the door startled me. "Just a minute," I called out.

"Ma'am, the shop is closing," the employee said from the other side. "You're going to have to leave now."

"Okay," I said, washing out my mouth quickly. I kept my hat on and my head tucked down when I walked out of the bathroom. The employee tried to get a good look at me, but I didn't make eye contact with her. Instead, I just made my way out of the shop and onto the dark, cold street.

My phone battery was all but dead, and it was almost eleven o'clock at night. My winter coat was more for fashion than it was for warmth, and I started to shiver immediately. I didn't know which way to go or whether I should even go anywhere.

I'd never been homeless before. Did I try and conserve energy and stay put? Or, did I try and keep warm by walking?

My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I'd barely eaten the entire day, and what I had eaten I'd recently deposited just inside the cafe. The sound of a dumpster being opened behind me had me turning towards the alleyway next to the shop.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. At the very least there weren't any reporters around to document my first dumpster dive. I made my way toward where I'd heard the noise and went to lift the lid.

That's when I felt the cold edge of a knife press against my throat.