AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His panicked eyes dart from her to me multiple times. “People’s opinion was that I wasn’t a family man. That I was incapable of love. They thought I was cold toward you and your mother. I needed to gain their trust back. I needed to show I would do anything for my daughter.”
When Alex talks again, she’s right next to me. There are no tears on her face. She’s not shaking anymore.
“That’s right.” Her voice is low, controlled. “So you sent Xi and his crew to kidnap me and hold me for ransom.” Her tone freezes me to the bone. It’s like nothing I’ve heard from her before. It’s like that glint I saw in her eyes earlier. So lethal.
“You let me stay in a filthy house with a dangerous man who assaulted me. You let him torture me until it’d been long enough for people to see you cry about your daughter. Andthenyou came to get me back. If people knew how you ‘took care of me’ afterward. That you wouldn’t even look at me. That you locked me in the same room I was taken from, while I was having panic attacks about that night. You let me cry until I passed out. You only got a nurse when you walked into my bedroom one morning and thought I was dead. You let my trauma get worse. You let it turn into PNES. You let medieon the inside.”
“You’re a slut who came when her attacker fingered her!” he roars. “That’s not my daughter!”
The shock makes me take a step back. He watched the whole video.
“I did,” she says, almost proudly. She fake pouts and presses her tits together with her upper arms. “He was just so good at it, Daddy.”
“You disgusting whore.” He spits at her feet, and I press the gun harder against his forehead.
“Do that again, and I will make you lick it off the floor.”
“He’ll do it, Dad,” Alex chuckles. It’s so cold. “Xi is abadman.” And it’s my turn to be on the receiving end of her sharp tongue. “You and your friends took the role so seriously, didn’t you? Such good actors. Pretending you didn’t know whose house you were in. Pretending it was asimplehome invasion so I would do everything you said.”
I lick my lips, racking my brain. What is she doing?
Her hard eyes narrow when she insists, “Am I right?”
“Yes,” I say simply, taken by the power she’s wielding over us.
“Well, would you look at that? Look at the men I’m surrounded with. A father who abused me since I can remember. The only thing he taught me was how to hide bruises with makeup. And a boyfriend who lied to me all along about being the man who had traumatized me.”
She looks at Tamar, her cute little smile back on her face. Except it’s as fake as they come. “No wonder a woman loses her mind, eh?”
“Alex,” I say tentatively. “Are you okay?” Her behavior is not her. She’s notherself.
There’s a pause before she hisses. “Of course, I’m not fucking okay.”
This woman scares me. This woman sounds powerful and in control. It’s a new version of Alex.
I think I love it.
My thoughts are cut short by her dad bursting into laughter—a genuine, maniacal-sounding laugh.
“Poor boy, don’t you see what she’s done?”
My brows furrow. I look at him, and when I look back at Alex, the confusion dissipates. She’s smiling at me like the devil would to a sinner’s soul he’s about to snatch. It’s eerie and, oh, so fucking sexy.
“She orchestrated this whole night,” her dad keeps on laughing. “What a little cunt you are, Alex.”
And I finally understand.
I understand that my beautiful girlfriend has been playing me.
She duped me into thinking I was in control tonight when she was the mastermind.
I felt it in her room earlier, but I didn’t trust my gut. I didn’t believe my sweet Alexandra could turn against all of us.
You could have kept it from me. Forever. I could have loved you till death had you just kept it to yourself.
“How long have you known?” I ask her calmly.
33
