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She looks up at me like she knows she’s about to break my heart. “I’m not pregnant.”
My heart rattles around in my chest, not believing her words. But before I can call her out for lying, she continues.
“And I knew.” She runs her hands through her hair in anguish. “I knew there was no way I could save him. No money in the world would be enough for his treatments. And me being in his life would only cause him to be hunted by my enemies, so I stayed away. I thought the kind thing to do was to let him die.”
I stand to my feet, throwing her to the ground. “You were wrong. Atlas could’ve been saved. He’s well now because I did what it took to save him. I found a treatment when there was none. I didn’t give up on him.”
Tears roll down her cheeks as my fury explodes at her.
How could she be so cruel? So heartless?
I’m steaming. I can’t look at her. I march around the grounds, still naked, trying to reconcile everything I know about her.
Liesel is manipulative. She’s controlling. And she has one mission in her life. She wouldn’t let us give up on a child who wasn’t even hers; there is no way she would have given up on Atlas, her own flesh and blood.
Something doesn’t add up.
She wants me to hate her.
She’s trying to force me into hating her.
It’s not going to work, not this time.
I march back toward her, where she’s crumpled into a naked, broken ball on the ground. Sand sticks to her skin. She looks hopeless and in pain.
Without a word, I scoop her back into my arms. She tries to fight me, tries to get me to let her go. I don’t.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting you back in the car, driving you to a hotel room where I’m going to clean you off, fuck some sense into you, and then hate you for the rest of my life!”
Her eyes narrow, looking up at me in complete confusion. She knows every time I’ve said the word hate, I mean the word love. It’s a word I can never speak out loud, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling it.
“I hate you, too,” she whispers.
Her head falls against my chest, relenting to me. She’s given up trying to protect me by getting me to hate her. I know a world of suffering awaits us, a pain like neither of us have ever felt before. But that’s not going to stop me from loving her.
I kick up our clothes from the ground with my h
and before carrying her back to the car. I pull my shirt down over her body and slip my jeans back on before I start driving us to the nearest hotel room I can find.
The hotel room isn’t much, but we just need some place to clean up, fuck, and regroup. We can’t stay here; it’s not safe.
I carry her inside the room and examine it. It isn’t much more than four walls, a bed, a toilet, and a hose hanging from the ceiling that can be used as a shower, but it will do.
I carry her straight to the shower, strip her shirt off, remove my pants, and then turn on the water. It’s freezing cold, as I expected, but we are both in too much pain to feel it.
I claim her mouth with mine, once again possessing her.
“Your pain is mine; stop hiding it from me,” I say, kissing her under the stream.
“It’s not my pain I’m worried about.”
“Stop suffering because you’re afraid to hurt me. Stop lying and hurting me now to prevent future pain. I want the truth, not the lies.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying I’m yours as much as you are mine. I’m saying I’ll hate you forever, and nothing you say can change that.”
