Wasn’t that too neat, too convenient?
“It didn’t look that way to me.”
“You saw a few seconds of what was happening between us. I was ending it. I shut down our deal too.” He took another step toward me, his shadow stretching across the hardwood floor between us. “She won’t be around any further.”
“Now you tell me about a deal I’d never heard of. Now you tell me she won’t be around anymore. Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“Selene…do you really want to hear about this?”
“No, Alaric, I want to sweep it all under the rug and bury my head in the sand, pretend you didn’t let the woman my father has used—again and again, publicly and privately, to humiliate me—put her mouth on you. The same woman who has sucked his cock since I was seventeen, and now yours because of a deal.”
“It wasn’t because of the deal,” he corrected simply.
I blinked, certain I’d misheard, but the expression on his face confirmed it. My fingers curled tighter around the device in my pocket.
“What does that mean?” My voice emerged as barely a whisper, though I’d intended it to be strong.
Alaric moved closer, and I took a step back until my shoulders fully met the shelf. He stopped, watching me with the same stillness he reserved for moments of complete control.
“It means,” he stated, his eyes never leaving mine, “that I let her get away with it for a sum of minutes for the simple act of having my dick sucked.”
His bluntness shouldn’t have shocked me—it never had before. He moved one more step closer. The familiar spice of his cologne reached me first, and then beneath it, underneath it, threaded through it—her. Coraline. The same rot I had just been thinking about, now literally on his skin, in the air between us, impossible to pretend away.
“You smell like my father’s whore,” I rasped, fighting back tears I refused to shed as I pressed myself further away from him.
He shifted back slightly. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry.’” The word came out of me like something I was spitting onto the floor between us. “You’resorry.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The man who had once looked at me with such devotion now regarded me with that same intensity, but something darker lurked beneath.
“I was saying I’m sorry because I should have showered first before coming in here. I’m not apologizing for what happened.”
The air left my lungs in a rush. I stared at him, waiting for the punchline, the explanation that would somehow make that sound differently, but his face remained impassive, resolute.
“You’re not...” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. The device in my pocket suddenly felt heavier, more significant.
Alaric studied my face, taking in every flicker of pain and confusion. “I’m not asking you to forgive me, Selene, and I’m not going to make excuses or feed you lies as if I were manipulated or confused. I made a choice with full awareness of what I was doing.”
He let the ugliness sit there, where it belonged. Doing nothing to soften it before he continued.
“I realized what the fuck I was doing. Realized it was wrong—on every level—and I told her to stop.” His hands flexed once at his sides; the only sign of agitation he ever let slip.
A bitter laugh escaped me as I stepped back to put space between us. “Are you admitting to me you wanted her too? Of course you did. You’re a man, just weak like all the others.”
For just a moment—a heartbeat, maybe two—something flashed in those piercing blue-gray eyes. A crack in his perfectly controlled facade. The satisfaction of it warmed my blood, a small victory in the battle I was clearly losing. But then it was gone, replaced by that maddening calm. He moved toward me with that predatory grace, closing the distance I’d tried to create.
“Don’t mistake honesty for indifference. I haven’t wanted anyone but you since the day I saw you at thatAzure. I never wanted the Darzi whore.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“I’ve never lied to you, Selene. I’ve killed for you. I’ve bled for you, but I’ve never lied and I have no reason to start doing so now.”
“Don’t you?” I countered, refusing to accept anything he said as true when it all sounded like it painfully was.
“No, I don’t. She’s been around for months,” he continued, voice clipped. “It’s all on camera. Every entry, every exit, every conversation logged. If you want to watch the footage, I’ll pull the files myself. I never touched her before tonight and hardly even then. I know I fucked up; I have nothing to dress it up in.”
I couldn't look at him anymore. Something inside me splintered with an almost audible crack. I wrapped my arms around myself as if it could serve as a barrier. His gaze lingered on my hand, the one Santos had bandaged when we got back. The split-second shift in his expression was so subtle most would have missed it, but I’d spent years learning to read every micro-expression that crossed his face.