My Girl by Jack Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

lot for it, too.’
    If Paige hadn’t been so terrified, she would have begged him to tell her. The fear of rape sat in the back of her mind. She eyed the condom on the edge of the bin.
    ‘I won’t contact you again. I’ll give you the phone. Here.’ She slid the phone across the stained carpet.
    ‘Do you know how stupid you are coming here?’
    ‘I’m sorry… I just… I had to know what he was up to.’
    ‘Your man bought a gun from me, lady. Whatever he was mixed up in ain’t worth your time, or your life. Prob’ly wanted to kill the man himself.’
    What man? Who would Ryan want to kill?
    ‘You can go.’
    She stared at him in disbelief.
    ‘You don’t wanna stay here, lady, trust me. Get up and fuck off.’
    Paige scrambled to her feet, the cigarette still burning between her fingers. She swung the door open and sprinted down the hallway for the stairs, following the trail of her own blood.

TEN
    Paige woke up on the sofa to a ferocious headache. The room was dark, but daylight framed the curtains. Her scalp was burning, as though clumps of hair and skin had been ripped from the bone. The palms of her hands felt tender and hot, and her whole body ached.
    The hitman.
    She took a couple of codeine tablets and waited for the pain to ease. It was as though her wounds had their own pulses, all of them screaming to be soothed.
    Paige went upstairs and showered, standing in a crimson pool as blood circled the drain by her feet. The shower gel stung her grazed palms.
    Once dry, she stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom and let the towel fall to the floor. Cuts and bruises covered her pale skin, like milk in a dirty glass. Her body was a bundle of contradictions wrapped in skin: she was too skinny in some areas, which was evident from her protruding ribs and collarbones, but plump in others, like the tyre of fat that was forming around her hips and stomach from drinking. In some lights she looked youthful: she had firm breasts that had not yet sagged; but in other lights her body revealed its age, as shown by the crow’s feet that had begun to form at the corners of her yellowing eyes. The faded scar from her caesarean smiled at her in the mirror. She ran a finger along it, feeling its ridges and bumps, and promised herself not to cry. Chloe had died and left nothing but scars.
    She studied her reflection: scraped hands and knees, bruises all over her body from the fall down the stairs, and a throbbing wound on her scalp that was hot to the touch. Her arm was covered in bruises from the hitman’s fingers digging into her skin.
    Paige sat on the bed as she slipped on her underwear and hooked her bra in place. She looked at the photo frame on her side of the bed.
    It was a photo of the three of them together: Ryan, Chloe, and her. But Ryan’s face was no longer there – it had been cut out.
    Paige snatched the frame from the bedside table and examined it.
    I didn’t do this.
    She threw on her dressing gown and began to check every photo frame in the house: he had been cut out of all of them.
    This can’t be happening. I know I didn’t do this. I’m not crazy.
    She knelt before the bookshelf in the living room and grabbed the photo albums from the bottom shelf. She flicked open the first album and raced through the pages. Ryan’s face had been removed from the photos: Ryan holding Chloe in the hospital after her birth, Ryan pushing Chloe on her first bike, their first family vacation abroad, birthdays, Christmases. He had been erased from every picture they had.
    ‘I’m not mad,’ she whispered over and over as tears fell onto the pages.
    Paige frantically searched every album, flicking the pages faster and faster, seeing nothing but holes where Ryan’s face should have been.
    Surrounded by tarnished photo albums, she sobbed into her grazed hands.
    What is happening to me?
    A photo from Chloe’s first birthday looked up at her from an open album. Chloe’s eyes were glowing from the lit