Two bombshells in one night were two bombshells too many.
First, "Amanda Clarke" had returned from wherever Takeda had kept her and not only that, but now, her stomach had begun swelling, and her mood started to become more volatile. What was worse, it was apparent that she was having Jack's child. That ruined everything I had worked for, an anticlimactic end to my otherwise successful war on the Graysons.
The other bombshell was that my mother, who I thought fell sick of pancreatic cancer in my childhood, had faked her death and was alive. While I could handle that, and would look into the revelation in the next week, Amanda would take some work.
But what I needed first was a paternity test, to see if it really was Jack's. The baby bump looked too large to make sense if it was Jack's.
Amanda and Jack had only met during the summer, and throughout the weeks they had been together (when she hadn't run off) they might've had sex, but not enough for her to be that far into pregnancy. My thoughts were that the child might belong to someone Amanda made love to at her trashy strip club. That would make sense, being that she would've be pregnant with their child all throughout her time in the Hamptons.
Other potential fathers were Tyler and Takeda. Perhaps she had been raped when Tyler kidnapped her, or they had even hooked up when she went against me. In Takeda's case, the former may have applied as well, him raping her to force her into submission.
Somehow I was going to have to get DNA of the child to try and match it to Jack, Takeda or Tyler.
Suddenly, it hit me.
"Jack and I are gonna have a baby."
She was pregnant. With. Jack's. Baby.
She. Is. A. Sham. She. Is. Shammanda.
Everything she'd said to me was like listening to nails on a chalkboard when I remembered it in my head. No, a better description was church bells when you were close to them, a horrid whistling, or a radio on full-blast next to your ear.
"Sammy was my dog after all… I missed you so much… I know, right? Jack and I are gonna have a baby…"
I felt my tongue whisper, "Baby…"
She threw her arms around me and acted as though I was still her friend, like she and I had never had any tension between us at all.
"I missed you so much."
I snapped.
A blood-curdling scream escaped from my lungs as I searched for something innocent to take my anger out on. I grabbed the nearest vase and threw it at the wall, trying to satisfy my insanity with the comparison of a shattered vase to Amanda's shattered skull. It wasn't enough.
More primal adrenaline rocked my wrists, moving to Victoria's present box of emptiness and flinging it into the burning fireplace. I pictured that it was Amanda's hair. That still wasn't enough.
Without thinking, I'd picked up a medium size wooden object sitting in front of the fire and…
WAIT A MINUTE.
The adrenaline was powerful, but not enough to make me destroy the last link I had to my parent. I inhaled and exhaled, slowly moving toward my kitchen table.
"I'm so sorry, dad," I whispered. "I almost destroyed you."
Backing away from the table, I continued to breathe in and out. I had no more energy, no more adrenaline. I collapsed in a miserable heap, sobbing onto the floor. Part of me was cursing myself that I was letting my emotions surface from way deep inside me. Another part was telling me to let them; I wouldn't give myself another chance for a long while. I just told both sides of the argument to shut the hell up and let me bawl my own damn eyes out.
My body felt so fragile, so much as though the slightest touch would finally make me shatter. Everything was just boiling over the pot, too much emotion for a young woman to handle. My father's arrest, my foster father trying to molest me, discovering my first dead body at Grayson Manor, Sammy's death, the discovery that my father's death was intentional, the plane's explosion and the supposed deaths of Victoria, Lydia and the evidence, Daniel turning to Ashley after we called off our engagement (according to her text), Amanda's pregnancy, and the discovery that my mother was alive. Did she have something to do with the conspiracy? Did she set her own husband up? Did she ruin her own daughter's childhood?
I wasn't even startled when a warm and gentle hand touched and lightly stroked my arm. The fact that he was touching me like that didn't even matter to me at all. It was more modest than the first real embrace as friends we'd shared hours prior, and I'd let him wrap his arms around me since kill or be killed firmly applied in that situation.
Rolling over onto my back, I let Nolan scoop me up off the floor. He carried me into my bedroom and set me down gently on my bed, then pulled up a chair beside me and sat down. I still did not flinch when he pushed my hair out of my eyes.
This was a bed I shared with the spawn of the Graysons only nights before. I didn't know if there was a chance he'd sleep in my bed again, nor did I care to learn.
This was also a bed I would not share the handsome barkeep of Montauk, since he was ripped from me by the egotistical girl who I foolishly paid off to imitate me.
At least I could share it with the man who was most loyal to my father, who had no one occupying him since "The Talented Mr. Hamptons". He was always there for me, with no social climber or erotic dancer taking up his time.
Sometimes I thought specific things about Nolan. I sometimes wanted to learn for myself if he was skinny or actually packed some muscle, if him holding me in my arms felt better than being held in that of Daniel or Jack, and even if he had a sizable… well, if sex with him was better than sex with Daniel. If I ever wanted to have a baby, and Amanda didn't get the hell out of Montauk, I would sooner have Nolan's child than Daniel's. No child of mine would ever be a Grayson.
Nolan whispered his nickname for me, Ems, and lightly stroked my hair. I knew he knew better than to say it things would improve for me, or to offer his hand in a relationship (though I wouldn't have bitten his head off as normal if he did). We both knew we should be looking for my mother, but right now I didn't have the energy to do it.
"I just want Ashley and Amanda to go away." I moaned. What if Daniel proposed to Ashley now that he and I had ended things? My ticket to revenge getting married to my rival and me being forced to look happy for them didn't seem like an attractive option. And if that baby really was Jack's? My bitch "friend" from juvie would have stolen the one thing other than revenge that I had looked forward to.
In addition to my current, revenge, I promised to myself I would seek revenge on the two girls. I would ruin them just as bad.
I saw a parallel between my "friendship" with Ashley and that of Victoria and Lydia. Like Lydia, would I be forced to expose my man's affair with his mistress, and ruin her life? Would she be thrown off a building, too? Would she discover my true identity? Would she die in another plane crash?
Groaning, I realized just how superstitious those thoughts sounded.
"Nolan, I wish Takeda had shot them too." I moaned again.
"But then you would have had more work to do, though you'd have pushed Lee beyond repair."
"Well, I guess that would've been nice too. How about we kill them both and pin it on the white-haired man?" we both chuckled, despite the tension in the air.
I got up off the bed and found a framed picture of Ashley and me, smiling. Taking it out of the frame, I imagined the deep red X I would cross over that smutty rich girl face of hers. I then took my Infinity Box out of its new hiding place in my staircase and took out my photo of Amanda, while imagining deepening the already red X over her equally smug face. Putting the pictures atop the other contents in the box, I made myself a goal of destroying both women.
I might not go back to Daniel, but nothing, not even a hot bartender, British social climber, or even a porn star would keep me from Jack. In that moment, I promised myself I would come back to Jack, no matter what the cost.