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And he played me for a fool.
Elliot gets out of my way before I crash into him and I plant myself in front of Will.
“You bugged my phone?”
“It’s not what you think, Aves.” Will’s eyes are wide, panicked, his usually tanned face drained of blood. “I swear to Christ, I can explain.”
“You’re lying. How could you possibly explain the fact that I trusted you, and you’ve been stalking me? After everything that happened to me, you thought it would be a good idea to follow me around like a fucking pervert!?”
Will flinches. He looks so pathetic, standing there in handcuffs with Elliot’s hand clamped around his wrist. Isobel, Elliot’s partner, stands nearby wearing a thinly veiled look of disgust.
“Okay. Okay.” Will’s eyes dart from me to Isobel to Elliot. I’m putting him in a bad position, and I know it. The old Avery Capulet would back down and give her enemy a chance to explain. The new Avery Capulet is incandescent with anger. My rage right now is brighter than the fucking sun. If he’s getting arrested, they can use his confessions against him and I’m going to stand here until I get one. Audience be damned.
“Okay,” Will says again. “I put some tracking software on the phone. An app. But it was only because—”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I wanted to protect you.” A note of anguish creeps into his voice, and in that moment, I’m back in the mausoleum with him, hearing it again under the force of his anger. “Someone’s out to get you, Aves. I had to—I had to know. I couldn’t risk losing you again.”
“You can’t spy on me to protect me. I’ve been watched for weeks. I’ve been tortured, and recorded—”
“He knew that, too,” Isobel interrupts. “He has video files of your time in captivity saved on his computer.”
It’s as if all the air has been sucked out of my lungs. This isn’t a panic attack; this is a death.
“I’m going to throw up.” I press my hand to my mouth, swallowing bile back down until my reflex to vomit all over Will is tamped down.
Will shoots her a look that’s pure venom. “I didnotsave files of you, Avery, you have got to believe me. They’re lying.”
“I can show you your laptop, if you’ve forgotten, Mr. Hewitt,” Isobel fires back. “There are plenty of video files on there. Your password was pretty fucking basic. Really? Avery2019?”
This, more than any other thing, makes my knees weak enough to buckle.
“This is a setup,” Will spits. “Come on, Avery, you’re actually buying this?!”
It was one thing to know my captors were recording the ultimate humiliation of being ground down to nothing. To less than nothing. To a bleeding shell of a woman desperate for a single bite of food and a sip of water.What a fucking joke. Those painful webs I thought my father’s money kept at bay were already around me. They were already choking me, suffocating me, and that was before the XO killer took me into a dark room and shattered the rest of my soul.
My throat throbs with sobs I won’t let surface.
“You piece of shit.” My voice is tight with unshed tears. If I start crying now, I’ll never stop. Not for the rest of my life. And I’m Avery Capulet. I’m not the kind of woman who’s going to fall apart now that everything’s over. “You watched that?”
Will’s eyes go a little wider. “I am being framed.” He’s all urgency, all insistence.
I shake my head bitterly. “You know, the least you could do is admit you did it.”
Will opens his mouth, but he’s clearly at a loss for words.
“It’s time to go.” Elliot tries to guide Will toward one of the cop cars, but Will digs his feet in. I’m dimly aware of the rest of the SWAT team circling us. Tension thickens the air. It’s a wretched, stinking thing. Police officers are coming out of the house, coming toward us, packing in.
“Avery,” Will yells. “You know me! You know I could never–”
“I thought I knew you,” I cut him off. “Turns out I never really knew you at all. Because the Will I thought I knew could never do something like this.”
Will almost manages to pull himself out of Elliot’s grip. “Listen to me! Somebody is setting me up. Somebody wants you to think the worst of me. I’m hardly the first boyfriend your fucking family has deemed unworthy and had carted away to prison! What, you think I don’t know what they did to that Montague kid? How they locked him up and threw away the key for something he didn’t even do?! I fucking know what they’re capable of. No wonder that motherfucker came back for revenge.”
His words cut me to my core. He knew about Rome being put in prison?
“How do you know that?” I whisper. “How could you know? That happened before I ever met you.”
