Page 139 of Carnal Wagers

Alizé De Villier. My stalker.

I sighed and swiped a hand down my face. A headache fluttered in my temples.

When Brody broke through a damn good evening and banjaxed it beyond recognition, I hadn’t cared beyond my rage. It hadn’t mattered that no records in France existed of an Alice Marine, or that Brody had made dozens of photographic comparisons between the Alice I fell in love with and the Alizé De Villier I married, because I thought I knew the woman I spent every moment with over the last month.

As I squeezed his throat, just as he did to her, and vessels popped in the corners of his eyes, all that mattered was that she was Alice to me. All that mattered through his hoarse inhales when I released him was that she was my woman and under my protection. Same when I carried her out of the gala under heavy camera flashes. When the clan doctor checked her over. When I made her soup and warm tea to drink and applied cream to the bruises between icing periods. Even now, as I scoured through every conversation we had. Every clue she left me.

She played me like a fiddle, me of all people, and I gobbled up her lies, then asked for seconds before she shoved me through a trash compactor.

A silent chortle lodged in my throat. It bobbed there, up and down, not sure which way to go, in the same way my rage and affection teetered on a knife’s edge, one moment sharp and ugly, the next tender and caring. What was I to do with her? What was I to do with this nagging anvil caving my rib cage in?

Sunrise came and went. Still, I made no move to leave her. There was nothing in the silence but a slow emptiness feasting on my insides.

When daylight snaked around the curtains, she stirred and twisted against my chest. Her wide blue eyes, bright against blown red vessels, stared up at me with what…affection? Shrewdness? Caution? Deceit? I didn’t know anymore.

“Hi,” she said, half croak, half whisper. A little smile curved up her face, and my inner balance tumbled right over into wrath.

How dare she be fucking happy when she wrecked my insides like a virus that wouldn’t quit its warpath.

“How does it feel?” I asked, my voice surprisingly steady.

Her prim fingernails skimmed the line of her neck, and her sweetness melted away. “Better. What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” Another lie? She recalled the events last night before she fell asleep.

“If only.” She dragged herself up, leaning on her arms. “I meant why.”

I scratched at my beard and gripped the back of the headboard with my other hand. So this was the game she wanted to play.

“What did Brody say to you?”

“Brody? Your brother?” Her gaze flickered left and right between sluggish blinks, confusion creasing her brows. Then her eyes snapped up. “It was your brother. Oh. I…He…he didn’t make sense. Said I killed her. That I got to live. I don’t know.”

She cleared her throat with a wet, raspy sound.

“His girlfriend was murdered.”

She scampered upright. Her hand rubbed over the mark my brother left behind, and I traced the colors with my eyes.

“By the serial killer I told you about. He’s angry because you’ve survived as long as you have when he only got a week with her. He thinks you’re lying about who you say you are.”

“Oh.”

One bland word that said so much and nothing at all. I gave her the opening of the century to spill her secret, and she gave me a fucking random interjection. Not a denial, not an admission. Just Oh.

Numbness seeped like a chill through my pores and crept into my bloodstream. It dragged me back down below the surface. The anger dulled. The hurt faded to a blunted thudding against my chest.

“We should get up.”

I scooted off the bed and padded to the bathroom before she voiced a protest or tried to sweet-talk me. I splashed water over my face to the sound of my name and stared at my reflection in the mirror.

Two paths lay ahead. One, I confronted her and discovered how far the rabbit hole went. Or two, I cut my losses and let her go. One where she revealed it was all subterfuge, and I lost her emotionally, or the other where Cranwell announced her dead in days to a couple of weeks, and I lost her physically. Neither sounded better than the other.

“When do we need to leave?” she called out.

A slight, pained croak tweaked her voice, and it tugged at a piece of me that wasn’t quite as numb as the rest.

I filled a cup of water, prepared two pain pills, and placed them on her nightstand.