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20
A dry,rasping, choked laugh rattles from Oliver’s cracked lips.
“You are un-fucking-believable, Ransom.”
From his hospital bed, he glares at me with his bloodshot eyes, slowly shaking his head even as he winces in pain.
Good.
“Where does it fucking end, Noel?” He growls. “When is it enough of your goddamn crusade!”
My eyes narrow dangerously, lips curling. I know I don’t have much time. After basically shoving Jacob aside to get into his father’s recovery room, he’ll have almost certainly gone to get hospital security. Or his own.
But for the moment, here we are again: two scarred, battle-damaged titans, squaring off with the hospital smell of antiseptics hanging in the air.
“With you behind bars, Prince,” I hiss thinly.
His brow furrows, head shaking again. It must hurt. He’s got bandages across the left side of his neck and down his left arm, which is in a sling from the explosion that rocked his penthouse living room a few hours ago.
“This has to fucking stop, Noel,” he grunts. “Ithas to. I know you hate me, but even I don’t have a shred of suspicion that this was you. And itclearlywasn’t me. Can we at least agree on that?”
I smile thinly.
No, we can’t.
If the explosion and resulting fire had killed him or horrifically disfigured him today, then, perhaps. Yes, had Oliver died in the incident of earlier, or been turned into a quadriplegic, I could be persuaded to no longer think of him as the monster I know he is.
Yet, here he is. And while he might be wounded and in pain, even I can read the chart at the end of his hospital bed.
He’s going to be fine.
The wounds are superficial. He’s got low-level burns that’ll heal probably without even plastic surgery. A couple of dings and cuts. A possible concussion. Some smoke inhalation.
But he’s not dead, and the words “false” and “flag” are suddenly blinking in neon inside my head.
Mr. Prince exhibits repressed anger issues, megalomaniacal tendencies, extreme narcissism possibly stemming from undiagnosed bi-polar disorder. And most worrisome, pyromaniacal fascination.
He doesn’t know that I’ve seen that. But I know what it means now that I have.
It means Prince is a fuckingliar. And a good one. The kind that might even fully subscribe to his own lies. Which makes him even more dangerous.
I’ve always thought of him as a rival. An adversary. An enemy, at times. But this is different, by magnitude.
He stares at me, his eyes hardening.
“You can’t seriously think I had anything to—”
“I think I’m going to use every single resource I have to put you into the deepest fucking hole I can possible find.”
His brow furrows, pained. Slowly, he turns his head, wincing as he looks out the window of the hospital room.
“What the fuck happened to us, Noel?”
You one-upped competing for cars and women to murder, you fucking psychopath.
But I don’t say that. As much as I simply want to beat him to death in this fucking room, I won’t. Not only because it would mean taking myself down, too—leaving my empire, my life…
Ella.
