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“Repeat after me.” Elise exhales. I made her do that a million years ago. I made her promise to help me this way. I made her tell me she hated me. All of this started as a twisted game. A revenge plot. And then…it stopped being a game. And I stopped saying this to her. “He’ll never hurt you again.”
“He’ll never hurt you again.” Her voice goes high and soft with the words. They’re not a joke, or a plot, or a game. Elise’s dark eyes swim with tears. “He caned Catherine. Did you know that? Jacob gave her a bubble bath.”
Knee-jerk betrayal makes my head throb. “That double-crossingprick.He touched her?”
“No.” Elise puts a hand on my chest, over my heart. Her touch hurts. I have bruises everywhere. The un-bruised parts of me feel just as sensitive. And I wouldn’t push her hand away for the world. I’d let her touch me even if it felt like a bullet wound. “Catherine told me that Jacob is treating her very well, and I believe her. You were right to trust him.”
Relief hurts, too. Letting out all that righteous anger on my next exhale moves my ribs. There were times in those alleys when I thought it would be better if I didn’t exist at all, but God, I was foolish.
“Good. I’d have gone to his place and ended him.”
Elise’s expression softens even more. “I know you would. But that’s not the point. The point is that my sister was hurt because I couldn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her.”
“Sweetness, sometimes you have to protect yourself first. She’s safe right now because you intervened.”
“I should have done it sooner.”
“You did it when you could.”
Elise shakes her head. “You know that’s not true. I could have done more.Youdid more. You did everything.”
“It didn’t feel like enough. Itneverfelt like enough.”
“It was.”
I lean down and kiss her. My body always ached after a night in the alleyways. I had bruises on my knees for years at a time. The pain from the fall touches all those places. Brings them back for flashes of time. Elise’s lips against mine keep me in the present, with her.
“Excuse us.” Three agents stand a few feet off, ready to descend on Bettencourt’s desk.
I put my hand on the small of Elise’s back and lead her away from the desk. Lead her all the way out of the office. The feds politely ignore us.
Outside the office door, I lean against the wall to catch my breath and pull her close.
At one end of the hall, Mason confers with a group of federal agents. Around the opposite corner, her father interrupts an agent mid-sentence. “Never.I was never involved in such a conspiracy. I had a fiduciary duty to the consortium to recoup our losses. By all means, keep searching. You won’t find anything.”
“That’s not true,” I tell Elise, my hands in her hair. “They’ll find everything.”
Her eyes widen, just for a moment.
“What you did was enough. I’m beginning to think that what I did was enough, too. It took a long time to see that.” I run the pads of my thumbs over her cheeks. “It tookyouto see that.”
Elise lets her forehead rest on my chest, hiding her face from me. “I love you.”
It’s been less than forty-eight hours since Elise told me she loved me for the first time. We were on the sidewalk in front of my brownstone, both of us wearing complimentary sweatsuits from the Bettencourt International gym.
She was so fucking beautiful, and she was astonishing. Elise Bettencourt wanted me through the whole fucked-up initiation. Her father couldn’t make her hate me. He couldn’t engineer a scenario where she wouldn’t want to be with me.
Out there on the sidewalk that night, I’d told her my true plan. To burn all the members of the consortium alive. Elise lifted her chin and told me she wouldn’t let me go after the consortium alone.
Murder is just not—you know what? It doesn’t matter, because I love you. If you want to go down this way, then I’ll go down with you.
She was willing to burn with me, but she doesn’t have to.
“I love you, sweetness. It’s over. We got to the end of all this twisted bullshit, and it’s done.”
Elise lets out a long, slow breath.
She doesn’t disagree with me.
