Lets him stand alone.
“After one night at Eclipse,” Shady says. “The night you left with that promoter.”
My laugh comes out sharp enough to cut me. “I left with a promoter because you were standing by the bar looking at me like you wanted to drag me out by my hair but hadn’t earned the right to tell me not to go. And it was business, not pleasure.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
His nostrils flare. “I was jealous. Pissed. Drunk enough to be stupid and sober enough that it’s still on me. I went to check on Cherry because she’d been spiraling, and she kissed me.”
I lift one brow.
He curses. “And I kissed her back.”
My face goes numb.
There it is.
The tiny ugly piece that makes the whole picture bleed.
“Did you fuck her?”
His silence answers.
I nod slowly.
“Mira, qué lindo. You kept one woman warm with guilt, hot with jealousy, and somehow I’m the one who ended up chained to a chair.”
I want the words to hurt. I want them to cut through leather and bone and whatever part of him thinks bleeding for me fixes lying by omission.
He flinches.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he says.
I step closer, ignoring the way my body protests. “Don’t insult me.”
His jaw clenches. “I didn’t. We weren’t serious then.”
“You let me walk into this with another woman’s grief sitting between us like a loaded gun.”
His voice drops. “I didn’t know they knew.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.”
“They knew about her sister. They knew about the baby. They knew you stopped answering. They knew she could get into my garage. They knew exactly which wound to press and which woman to throw at me.” My throat tightens, but I refuse to cry in front of all these men.
He looks wrecked.
I hate that too.
I wanted clean anger. Easy anger. The kind I could wear like red lipstick and not smudge. But Shady standing in front of me, bloody and silent and finally telling the truth, makes everything messier. The chemistry is still there, sick and pulsing under my skin. My body remembers his hands. My mouth remembers his. Some dark, exhausted part of me still wants him to drag me into a room, lock the world out, and make me feel alive in a way that doesn’t taste like fear.