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They block my path, and breath pops from my lungs.
It’s her.
And I’m not ready for this. I glance up and the shock in her eyes; she’s not either.
“Hey.” She’s the first to murmur.
“Hey.” I’m supposed to step aside and let her pass. I don’t. What do I say next? “I like your hot date.” Yep, I revert to an asshole when hurt. “Looks familiar.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s my twin. You have a type now?”
“Yeah,”—pain and pissed-off swirl in her eyes—“it’s called men who don’t hate me.”
“Low criteria.”
“Matches how I feel.”
Fuck, we’re gonna make this brutal. We’re gonna hurt each other because we’re dying inside.
“That’s your fault.”
“And he’s my hot solution.”
She tries to step by me, but I’m too big to pass even three steps below her. What the hell do I want? Spin the wheel and tell me.
“Did you even care that it would end us? Will you ever tell your parents what you did?”
The questions kill me as cold frosts her eyes.
“Leave them out of this.”
I try imagining what her mama would say. As the former Sheriff, Mama G would be livid, but Cade’s protecting her from the truth. And Cade’s dad? Well, he’d probably load the gun.
Did she ever stand a chance of not being a lethal renegade?
I step aside and mutter, “Happy Birthday.”
It’s today, the seventeenth. And I mean it. And I hate like hell I’m not celebrating it with her because mine’s the tenth. We’re only a week apart. That, like most things, used to bind us.
Now… everything tears us apart.
“You too.”
Her tone, I don’t know it. She brushes past me and her perfume; it’s not ours. It’s not BOUND perfume. It’s the new one from the same designer we also did the ad for—FREE. And it seems she is.
Free to leave me in the wreck she made.
My next step is a blur until I hear, “Redix?”
I turn, and the way she’s staring up at me—vulnerable, loving. We’re back on our beach for our prom, and she’s gazing up at me in the candlelight. That night, I proposed to her, giving her an infinity necklace because she was the love of my life, and I only wanted to spend it with her.
“Are you happy like this?” she asks.
No.
Because her neck is bare now.
