Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

said. “How bad it is, we won’t know until we do a biopsy. I’ve got one scheduled for next week. But the doctor’s already talking about aggressive chemotherapy, so I know he thinks it’s pretty bad.”

Lori wanted to say something to comfort Justin, but nothing came to her. What can you say to someone who’s just told you that their body has betrayed them in one of the most horrible ways imaginable?

“Where are you? I want to see you.”

In an awful way, she was almost glad Justin had called her with this news. It gave her something to focus on besides herself and the shitshow her life had become in the last twenty-four hours. She would go to Justin, comfort him as best she could, and in so doing hopefully forget – if only for a little while – about the Cabal. She knew this was selfish, that it made her a terrible person, but there it was.

“I’m at work. I wanted to try to keep the rest of my day as normal as possible, take my mind off—” he paused, “—off it. It’s not really working, though.” He let out a mirthless laugh.

She wanted to tell him to leave work so they could be together, but she didn’t. Doing so would be focusing on her needs, not his. Maybe she wasn’t so selfish after all.

“Then how about after work? I could come over to your place.”

Justin almost never came to her apartment. Even if Larry wasn’t there, his presence was – at least that’s what Justin said – so when they spent time together, it was usually at his condo.

“Sure,” he said, voice devoid of emotion. “That would be great.” Another pause, then, “I should go. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do this afternoon.”

“Okay. I’ll come over around six. Sound good?”

He didn’t respond to her question, and she wondered if he’d even heard it.

“Bye,” he said, then disconnected.

Normally, he told her he loved her when he said goodbye to her over the phone. It always made her uncomfortable, but now that he hadn’t said the words, she was surprised by how much she missed hearing them.

She put her phone back in her purse and sat there for several moments, trying to absorb what Justin had told her. Her initial reaction was that he was too young to get cancer. She knew this wasn’t true, though. Cancer could strike at any time during a person’s life, and while she associated lung cancer with smoking, she also knew that a person who’d never touched a cigarette could also contract it. Still, she couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that Justin’s diagnosis was related to the Cabal somehow. Perhaps they’d caused his cancer in order to punish her further. She recognized this as another egocentric thought – that she was trying to make Justin’s cancer about her when she should be thinking about him. And even if the Cabal wanted to harm Justin to punish her, it wasn’t as if they’d made him sick overnight. He hadn’t told her he was getting a CT scan, but he would’ve had to have had it done at least a few days ago in order to get the results this morning. It took time for a pathologist to examine the scan’s results and then send a report to Justin’s doctor. Whatever abilities the Cabal possessed, they couldn’t reach backward in time to give Justin cancer. Then again, who knew what they could do and what sort of unnatural laws governed their actions?

If Justin’s cancer had been caused by the Cabal, however they’d managed it, that meant no one she knew was safe. They’d already done something to Katie and Melinda. Who else might be next? Reeny and her family? Their parents? Larry? Her clients at the clinic? She couldn’t let any harm come to them, but she had no idea how to prevent the Cabal from hurting them.

Or did she?

She remembered Reeny’s words about the Cabal.

If you can figure out what they think you’ve done, then you can make amends for it, whatever that entails.

Like in a twelve-step program, Lori thought. She’d never gone through such a program herself, but she’d worked with clients who had. She couldn’t remember which of the twelve steps making amends was, but she knew it was an important one. Maybe Reeny had been on to something. At least it gave her a place to start. But who had she wronged to such a degree that she needed to formally apologize to them? She was hardly a perfect human being, but she didn’t careen thoughtlessly through life, causing damage to others along the way. She wasn’t impulsive, always tried to think through her actions and anticipate their consequences before doing anything. She worked hard to avoid hurting anybody. So what could she possibly have done that the Cabal considered so bad that it warranted harassing her? No, more than that – torturing her. There wasn’t anything she could think of.

That’s not exactly true, and you know it.

Maybe she thought about the consequences of her actions these days, but she hadn’t always been that kind of person, had she?

Aashrita.

The moment she thought the name, her mind fought to snatch it back, to drag it down into the depths of her consciousness and bury it once more, as it did whenever she thought of Aashrita. But she didn’t let it happen this time. There was too much at stake.

Aashrita, she thought. Aashrita, Aashrita, Aashrita.

She backed out of her parking space, then headed for the road—

—and Woodlawn Cemetery.

Chapter Six

Debra Foster parked her blue Ford Mustang – with a bumper sticker that said I’d rather be in the saddle – in front of Get Moving! at roughly the same time as Lori and Reeny left A Taste of Thai. She was pissed off, but that wasn’t anything special. She was always pissed off about something. At the moment, she was angry that she couldn’t find her goddamned reading glasses. She’d looked everywhere for