“Nice?” he scoffs. “Youlikehim?Him.”
I’m all tight breath and empty static andwho could forget youas my brain scrambles for anything to say, anything at all. Faust waits, a muscle in his jaw twitching, the rest of him very, very still. And in the quiet, two things occur to me at once. The first is surface level, easy. It’s the realization that pretending to date Bernard will make Faust and the rest of the team think I’m dating the absolute worst man on the planet.
And the second is a feeling. Deeper, harder. Something I can’t name, unraveling down my spine. Something that feels too big to touch and too shapeless to hold on to.
“Maybe I do,” I say, swallowing against the glass in my throat. “So what? What happens if I like Bernard? Are you going to stare at me some more? Name-drop me on television so that my—my boss gets angry? What are you, jealous?”
I don’t mean to say it, only there’s the word, and it makes that feeling a little sharper, a little easier to see. Faust blinks, twin lines crinkling along the edges of his angry eyes. “No.”
“Are you obsessed with tracking down everyone else’s lies?”
His nostrils flare and his mouth stays shut, but I can see his answer, right there on his face.
No.
“So maybe I lied, maybe I got this job because I thought I mightmeet him, okay. You caught me. Yay, Faust. You did it.” I’m thinking on my feet, agile, going wherever this is going to go. Every word hurts to say, but at least I’m moving. “But don’t judge me for doing what I have to do in this world. You’re more like him than you’re not like him. So please,please, don’t ruin this for me.” Saying that stings the most; it’s honest.
His eyes flash. Surprise, hurt, surprise. Then his arms cross, muscles flexing defensively over his broad chest. “You can’t speak to me like this, Cat.”
Whatever emotion that had been building inside me vanishes, and all that’s left is my anger. Decades of it, swirling behind every fake date, every forced laugh, smiling through being called abitchandfrigidand every other word men use to try and control women, watching the charities that I donate to fold up shop year after year because what I do just isn’t enough. Bills. Debt. Broken hearts. Broken families. Entire countries and climates and cultures ransacked for what—money? Another drop in these billionaires’ buckets? Their greed is endless, and I can’t understand it, and I hate it, but my anger is endless, too. If I can’t stop them, I can meet them, sin to sin. Greed to rage. And that’s why I don’t believe in any of it, that we get anything great after we die. Because this is hell, right here; and my anger at being hurt cannot be just as bad of a sin as the greed that makes the Bernards and Fausts of the world hurt me. The bruise can’t be punished as harshly as the hand.
“Why?” I hiss. “Because you’re a billionaire, so I’m supposed to treat you like royalty?”
“Because you don’t know me,” Faust says roughly. “And I am not a billionaire.”
“Multimillionaire, then. Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he huffs. “Do you think I can personally control how hyper-capitalist this sport can be?”
“Do you even try?”
“I fund ten charities in my hometown. Hundreds, thousands of salaries.”
“Oh, you’re the kindest duke in the ton—”
He gives me a wild, confused look, then continues. “My family lives off what I give them.”
My breath catches. Sucker punched. “That, I…”
“Doesthatimpress you?” he says, blunt as ever. “You won’t like Bernard, then.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Whereas his intensity has been stifling before, now the anger etched into his face is like flame let loose. Bounding and exciting and destructively mesmerizing. “You do,” he snaps, his dark gaze clinging to mine as words tumble from his lips. “You and me, Cat. You think we’re not alike? My whole life, everyone here has underestimated me because I wasn’t born into money. I worked to get here. My family sacrificed to put me in the kart as a child. And I’ve had to sit here, silently, for thirty-three years, and take how much people like Bernard hate me for it. They hate that I’m hungry, they hate that I show to them that there are others out there, right now, who would be good enough to drive in Formula 1 if they had the chance. But those people never will, because their parents weren’t drivers, and their families aren’t millionaires.Whydo you think Bernard left?”
I’m breathless, air trembling at the edge of my lungs. Wordless.
“Because,” he pushes on, “I remind him that he will never be able to prove that he’s special. He was born with everything, so of course he haseverything. That isn’t greatness. It just is the fucking bar on the floor. Enjoy it, if you stoop that low.”
“You don’t know me, either—”
My rebuttal is cut off by frantic knocking on the door. “Faust!” someone yells. “We need to get moving.”
We both go quiet, looking at each other in surprise. I hadn’t noticed how much of a bubble we’d been in, just me and him and this anger. Faust presses his lips together, ignoring whoever’s outside. “I think I do, though. I’m starting to,” he says, like we’d never been interrupted. “I know the sort of person he goes for. It isn’t you.”
Imogen’s tearstained face flashes in my memory, her bridal makeup puddled down her cheeks. “Kind?” I ask.
“Fixable,” Faust says quietly. “He wants a woman he can fix, then break again when he leaves.”
