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“Yes, because—well, at the time I was running this sort of side-hustle blackmailing the rich creeps at his club. Then one night, on Halloween—” And then I stopped myself and leaned closer to Sophie. “This won’t affect the case, though, right?”
“Nothing you could possibly say to me would affect the case.” Sophie took my cheeks in her hands and spoke to me with her forehead pressed against mine. “He doesn’t get to own you, Willow. Nobody does!”
I could have kissed her there and then, but I’m pretty sure her boyfriend would have physically fought me. That man looks at her like she’s the sun at the very centre of his universe and his entire existence would fade into absolute darkness if she were to leave him.
Later that night, when he came to pick her up and she slumped against his big chest and stared up at him, he cradled her face in his hands like it was made of the most precious porcelain and whispered, “You’re so fucking beautiful it physically hurts to look at you.”
And the way he looked at her made me feel like I had no choice but to look away. I waved them both goodbye and walked home, hoping the fresh air would make me feel better.
But all I felt for the rest of the night was pure anger at the world for giving others men like Evan and for givingmeLuca, and then not even letting me keep the psychotic fucker.
Almost half a yearafter I move to New York—when I’ve been working at the studio for several months and start building a little list of my own clients and I have plants in my flat that areactually alive and an adopted cat with an attitude problem and I’ve cut down my smoking a bit and I’m finally starting to feel like I could live a normal life even with a big dark gaping hole right in the middle of my chest where a certain creepy psycho might have existed—I get a call from Sophie.
“I have good news and bad news,” she says.
Something else I like about Sophie—she doesn’t waste time on preamble, and she doesn’t beat around the bush. She’s blunt and efficient and makes no apologies for her directness.
It’s a Thursday evening, I’m lying in a piping hot bath painting my toenails with my laptop balanced on a stool by the tub playing a dubious anime about a peppy witch who accidentally conjures up a tentacle monster transdimensional god with whom I have no doubt she’s promptly going to fall in love.
Given my taste in men, I know I would.
“Bad news first,” I tell Sophie, reaching over the edge of the bathtub to press pause on my anime.
“No,” Sophie says. “Good news first.”
I laugh. I slap my laptop closed, screw shut my bottle of nail polish, set it aside, and lie back against the edge of the tub.
“Alright. Let’s hear it.”
“I think I’m going to get you out of that contract.”
A tightening in my chest makes me catch my breath. “You do?”
The contract feels a bit like a collar around my neck. It’s no longer attached to a chain—there’s nothing Luca can really do about it while he doesn’t know where I am—but it’s still a reminder of the hold he had on me. Of what happened between us. It’s still a reminder ofhim.
And that’s why I want to be free of it, and that’s why being free of it will be devastating, too. My last link to him, the final tether to everything that happened between us.
The mess and the violence and the sex and the wanting, the toxic, cruel desire that poisoned our minds and bodies. I couldnever love Luca Fletcher-Lowe, but I know nobody else will ever make me feel the way he did. Like he saw me for the broken, jagged thing I am and laughed in elation and grabbed at it with both hands, never flinching away from all the blood and the pain and the pleasure.
“Yes, Willow. I wasn’t sure at first—the contract is very complex and it reads like it’s been designed to be nebulous and impenetrable. The language is very dense, the terms—well, Machiavellian. A contract the devil himself couldn’t write.”
I can’t help it. I laugh. If only she knew.
“But,” Sophie says bracingly, “just because a fight seems impossible to win doesn’t mean we should wave the white flag. So I got to work and put together some terms, and I reached out to his office, and—well, I’ve received a response.”
“The bad news?” My voice is light, but there’s a heaviness sitting on my chest, shortening each breath,
There’s a short pause. “I received a responsein person.”
“Oh.”
Luca is in New York.
I almost don’t feel anything at all. I sink deeper into my bath.
“How did he seem?”
“Hard to tell. He looked like a sickly robot—but to be fair, that’s what he always looked like, even back in school. He looked like he might have come here to fight or to beg. I suppose we’ll find out.” Sophie sighs. “That’sthe bad news. He wants to meet and negotiate in person. I told him I’d ask you—I assured him I would have to be present.”
