I swallow roughly but get nothing but dried air in return. I turn slowly on my heel, and my despair grows. The deep sound of a voice behind me making me wish the floor could swallow me alive in embarrassment. The words rolling off her tongue in a heated fury. I used to tell myself that it was a dream, but it never worked. Those cold, human-less eyes made my skin crawl as they scanned my body. Acid sitting in my throat remembering the scent of pork rinds mixed with stale beer his mouth too close to someone who’d barely turned fourteen. I could smell his breath on me all over again. Made you feel like you were nothing.” She pauses and again I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or herself.

Guess I could admit she was right about what she’d said earlier.Like knew like.Only someone who’d suffer the same fate would understand why certain measures are taken. Wanting nothing to do with Abram or anything associated with him after he’d abandoned me. Until that day, I’d never touched a portion of that money. “That’s where that money went, didn’t it?” Lorna’s face almost softens at my discomfort before it turns canny. It was slow, like wax dripping down a candle.

The sensation snapping me back to reality as a single chill races down my spine. I fight through the familiar pain as it hits me. Left to rebuild myself after the foundation was the only thing surviving. That man had hollowed me the day he attempted to take my innocence. My fingernails dug into the soft flesh of my palm as everything else inside me stilled all over again. I would never forget the man who’d done the same to me. Her own eyes darkening, growing distant as if she too was remembering her abuser. “You don’t forget the face of the person who does something like that to you,” Lorna says. Even if we were equals in this one thing. The expression on her face grew, the more mine soured. She was too confident, too overbearing, for someone who wasn’t correct. It was the only way I was still holding it together. If I so much as blinked, I was going to lose it.Lorna knew.I keep my eyes focused on her.

Shattered Princess by Amber Vant