Page 100 of Bared

“What?” she demanded, hating the trail-off that was so unlike Samsyn. “Damn it, bonsun. Just tell me.”

“Some reporters are already speculating you as Brickham’s accomplice. Not just LaBarre’s assassination. In the last ten minutes, the assault on Carris has been added to the accusations.”

Well, that took care of the breathing concerns altogether. Still she was able to retort, “Assault? So that’s what the pig is telling everyone? Likely not including his contribution to the verb, right? The part of the evening where he pinned me down and was getting ready to—”

“Fuck.”

“Not the verb I had in mind, but it lands in the neighborhood.”

“I shall rip his goddamned balls out. And then break his filthy knees.”

“Brickham already got that ball rolling for you.”

Her brother roughened the line with a reluctant grunt. Something in his undertone took Jayd back to days when she had crushes on his friends, and how he always seemed to know. Did he discern the same thing now?

Except that Brickham was not the same as those boys. Not in everything she had shared with him. Done with him. Certainly not in what she still felt about it. Feelings they had both agreed not to have at all…

She only had to wrestle with that confusion for a few seconds longer, thanks to Syn’s fresh snort. It sounded like he was back in Alpha Arcadian Security Chief mode, which she welcomed with relief—even as he uttered his next words.

“Well, now you know why I pulled a few favors and scrambled up the jet at Le Bourget.”

Yes, those words.

The ones she had all but expected by now—but knew she would dread. Only there was her fatal mistake. Thinking dread could come close to describing the stinging sadness along her veins and the vast vacuum in her heart. Worst of all, the pragmatic princess that stomped back into her mind, bearing a scepter of shitty truth.

“Thank you, rerda,” she told Syn with as much sincerity as possible. Regrettably, she still sounded—and felt—miserable. “You are right.” Creator on high, why did he have to be so right? “It is time to go home.”

She handed the device back over to Ozias as they sped out of the Paris city limits, and signs whizzed by declaring that Bourget was less than ten kilometers away. Too damn close—just like time was passing too damn fast, and Brickham’s embrace was feeling too damn good…

And her heart was clenching too damn painfully.

Just like she was too damn sure that “home” was never going to feel like that again. Not the way it did before.

But what choice did she have about things now? The authorities were hunting her as equally as Brickham, but he would be able to leave the car at Bourget, take ten steps, and be just another face in a crowd. She had one of the world’s most recognizable faces, with no time or materials for another impromptu makeover. Not that the first one had helped, in the end.

The end.

This was not that.

Maybe if she told that to herself a million more times, she would start to believe it.

Or maybe—likely—she would not.

And that would have to be okay too.

Who, under the Creator’s vast sky, was she trying to kid?

The world would not be okay for a long time to come. She just wished she could think of a scenario in which it could be—without the vision involving Maximillian Brickham.

Saints help her. It was going to be hard.

No.

It was going to be impossible.

Chapter Fourteen

Samsyn Cimarron had a lot of friends in some damn high places.