She appeared on screen with her loose curls framing her face, wearing Tristan’s oversized sweatshirt, propped up against pillows in her bed, so fucking beautiful, it hurt. Desire and guilt and need shot through me.
“Hi,” she said quietly, her eyes luminous in the low light.
I could see it immediately—her unreadable expression, the way she held her shoulders, the tightness around her mouth. She was performing, holding herself together through sheer force of will, that stubborn control she refused to let go of.
“What happened to upset you during the game?” I asked, my voice rougher than I intended. The vodka had brought everything too close to the surface.
“You saw?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed hard. “They played like shit.”
Because I’d dragged them into my revenge and then broke the heart of the team. I reached for my glass, remembered the camera was on, and moved my hand away from it instead.
“What upset you, baby girl?”
She was so good at hiding, at pretending, at showing nothing while everything inside her broke into a million pieces.
“Cole brought his fiancée to the game,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.
Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” I said simply.
“Me too.” Her eyes fell, and I watched her jaw tighten. “Not that I have the right to him. He’s made his feelings clear, and so have I, and that’s the end of that, right?”
Wrong, so fucking wrong, I didn’t know where to start.
“It’s fine.” She smiled, bright and false. “I’m fine. It’s whatever. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it.”
She was going to shatter if someone didn’t take the weight off. And she’d called me, which meant some part of her knew I could.
“Eva, where are you right now?”
“What?”
“Physically. Where are you?”
She glanced around as if she’d forgotten. “In bed.”
“Show me.” When she hesitated, I gentled my voice. “Just let me see that you’re safe.”
After a long moment of looking into the camera, she held up her phone to show me a panorama of her space—a small room, neat, the bed taking up most of the space, textbooks stacked on a cheap desk in front of a curtained window.
“Good girl,” I murmured before I could stop myself.
She flinched. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t try to— We’re not—” She gestured helplessly between the phone and herself.
She was wrong again. We absolutely were, and I knew it because she’d called me.
“Eva, I want you to do something for me.”
“Alek—”