Bearing the Ruthless Alpha's Twins novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Cash on the Floor

Ingrid wakes alone to a text from Torin's number and an envelope of cash, leaves Hollowbrook, and learns at a free clinic that she is carrying two heartbeats.

I woke up alone on the cushions with grey light coming through the boathouse slats.

The blanket was tucked around me, and his side was cold.

"Torin?"

Nobody answered.

His shirt was gone, and his jeans were gone, and so was the dress that had been lying at my feet.

In its place sat a folded stack of someone's sweatpants and a plain grey hoodie, with a phone on top.

It was mine.

Someone had carried it down from the house and left it there.

There was one new message, from a number saved in my contacts as Torin.

I had saved it myself two years ago, from a group project he had never done his part of.

I opened it.

"Don't make this a thing. Nobody needs to know. Take this and keep your mouth shut."

I read it three times, and each time it said the same thing.

The door was open a crack.

On the floor in the sunlight lay a thick white envelope.

I picked it up with both hands.

It was full of cash, hundreds, rubber-banded in stacks.

I did not count it.

My eyes had gone hot and blurry, and I took off my glasses and pressed my wrist against them.

Then I put them back on.

There was no one on the dock, no one on the path, and no one at the house.

A boy I did not know was sweeping beer cans off the porch, and he did not look up when I walked past in someone else's sweatpants.

I walked back to campus alone.

Briony was coming out of the dorm when I reached it, in running clothes, with her hair in a high tail.

"Ingrid!" She hugged me before I could step back.

"I looked for you at the party, and I'm so sorry, I got pulled into a drinking game and then I heard you left with Torin."

"I did," I said.

"Are you okay?"

I thought about saying it.

I thought about holding up my phone and the envelope and asking her what kind of person he was.

"I'm fine," I said.

She squeezed my arm.

"If you ever need anything, you've got my number now."

She jogged off.

I did not think about it again for a very long time.

In my room I sat on the bed with the envelope in my lap and counted what was in it.

Eight thousand dollars.

It was more money than I had seen in my life.

I had no family, no scholarship beyond the pack's charity place, and my place would be gone the second Torin told his father I had embarrassed him.

I understood the text now.

He did not want me gone.

He wanted me quiet, and he had paid for it.

I picked up my phone and typed a reply.

I deleted it.

I typed another one.

I deleted that too.

He had said stay till morning, and I had stayed.

Then I did the thing I should have done two years earlier.

I stopped waiting for him to be kind.

I packed a bag in ten minutes, left my dorm key on the desk, and walked out of Hollowbrook before the first class bell.

I took the bus south, then another bus south from there.

I stopped when I ran out of state lines I could afford.

It was a month before I noticed I was late, and six weeks before I let myself think the word.

The clinic was a low gray building behind a laundromat, and the waiting room had four chairs and a fish tank.

I gave them a name that was not mine.

The nurse had a paper cup of tea and a warm voice.

"Lie back for me, hon," she said.

"First one?"

"First everything."

She squeezed the cold gel onto my stomach and moved the wand.

The screen was gray, and then it was a small bright flicker, and then another one next to it.

"There's your baby," the nurse said, and then she stopped.

She tilted the screen.

"And there's your other baby."

I stared at the two small flickers.

I had no home, no job, no family and eight thousand dollars I had not earned.

I had a boy who had paid me to disappear, and I was nineteen years old in a town where nobody knew my name.

"Two?" I said.

"Two heartbeats, strong and healthy."

She patted my hand.

"Do you want me to call someone?"

"There's no one to call," I said.

Then I said it out loud, to the screen and to the nurse and to myself.

"And he is never going to know."

I wrote it on the back of the appointment card so I would not forget.

Walking out into the cold with the card in my pocket, I stopped at the bus shelter and read the schedule.

The last bus south left in an hour.

I bought a ticket.

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