Page 125 of The Beast

Chapter Thirty-Six

I don’t sleep.

After Gabriel leaves, I stand on the balcony for a long time, watching the city lights blur through tears I refuse to let fall. The wind is cold up here—fifty-four floors of cold—but I barely feel it. All I can feel is the hollow ache in my chest where Gabe used to live.

He said all the right things. Made all the right promises. And I believe he meant them. In that moment, standing in front of me, he meant every word.

But moments pass and promises fade. And I’ve spent my whole life learning that the people who love you are the same people who hurt you most.

My father loved me. In his own twisted way, I think he really did. Maybe still does. And look what that love cost Gabriel. Cost us.

So, yes. Gabriel loves me. I don’t doubt that anymore. But love isn’t always enough. Sometimes love is the dark thing that destroys you.

I close my eyes, blocking the view when I’m trying to block my thoughts. Trying to simply be.

Turns out, just existing is harder than it sounds.

Eventually, I go back inside, and I wander through the rooms, too restless to sit, too exhausted to stand. The kitchen is stocked with things I don’t want to eat. The bar is stocked with things I probably shouldn’t drink. The massive flat-screen TV offers a zillion channels of nothing I want to watch.

I try anyway.

I curl up on the leather sofa, wrapped in a cashmere throw as I flip mindlessly through channels without seeing any of them. News—too depressing. Reality TV—too vapid. A romantic comedy that makes me want to throw the remote because the couple on screen is fighting about a forgotten anniversary instead of, oh, I don’t know, whether one of them is going to murder the other’s father.

I turn it off.

Silence is better. Much better.

Except it’s not. I’m completely at loose ends. The penthouse feels too big. Too empty. And the silence is pressing in from all sides like something physical.

On top of all that, I keep glancing at my phone, waiting for what? Gabriel to text? To call? To tell me he’s changed his mind, or I should change mine, or that somehow in the last hour he’s figured out the magic words that will make all of this okay?

There are no magic words. I know that. But I keep hoping anyway.

I think about calling Harper and pouring out everything to her—the fight, the apology, the impossible choice Gabriel is asking me to make. She’d listen. She’d probably even have something wise to say, or at least something sarcastic enough to make me laugh.

But it’s late, and she’s probably still in New York, dealing with her own crisis, and I don’t want to be the friend who interrupts someone else’s crisis to whine about her own.

So I sit. And I stare at the ceiling. And I sip whiskey and consider a bubble bath and try to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do now.

Do I believe him?

The question circles through my mind like a shark, restless and hungry. He said he’d choose me. Choose us. Choose the courts over blood. But I’ve heard promises before. My father promised to protect me while he was plotting to kill the man I loved. David promised our engagement was just business while he was falling in love with me.

Even Gabriel. For those first two years he gets a pass. But once he was fully entrenched at The Beast? Once I’d moved from Connecticut to the Monarch so I could learn the business inside and out? Once he was literally just a few blocks away?

And still he stayed silent?

Honestly, it makes my heart hurt.

Of course, if my father hadn’t tried to kill him—hadn’t made him believe I was in on it—well, of course, he’d have come back.

Is that what’s making me so pissy? That he lost faith in me?

I shake my head. I just don’t know anymore.

Except I do. At first, yes. That stung. His hatred. His fury. And all directed against a woman that wasn’t really me.

That about killed me, that lack of trust.