"Keira—"
"I'll try," I cut him off. "For both our sakes, I'll try to find a way forward. But don't ask me to pretend the past few days never happened. Don't ask me to forget who you've become."
His expression looks pained. Is it guilt? Whatever it is, for a moment, I want to soothe it. I close my eyes as I’m forced to acknowledge that the line between hating Phoenix and wanting him is easily blurred when he’s not being a jerk. My body remembers his touch even as my mind catalogs his cruelties. My heart recalls his tenderness even as it guards against fresh wounds.
I don't know if I can trust this change in him. I don't know if I can trust myself.
16
PHOENIX
Istand before Keira, watching her steely eyes take my measure. The woman I once knew is still in there somewhere, beneath layers of armor she's built against me. Against the world. Against pain.
"I don't expect you to love me again," I say, the words making my heart ache. "But I need this arrangement to work."
Her laugh is sharp, cutting. "And humiliating me in front of your men was your strategy for making it work?"
The memory of last night's dinner flashes through my mind, her in that red dress, my cruel words, the champagne dripping down my face. Shame crawls up my spine.
"I wanted to hurt you." There’s not trying to deny it.
"If you want revenge so badly, why focus on me instead of my father? He's the one who orchestrated everything. He's the one who destroyed your family." Her expression is genuinely puzzled.
Why indeed? Hampton Kean deserves every ounce of my hatred, yet I've been pouring it all onto Keira.
“I suppose it’s because I don’t expect anything different from your parents. But you… you betrayed me.”
"Did I?" Her gray eyes search mine, and I wonder what she’s looking for. The old me, maybe. "Or is it easier to believe I betrayed you than to accept that your father played a part in bringing this on?”
Anger rises. “Don’t you dare blame my father?—”
“He and my father are from the same ilk. Do you think he wouldn’t have killed my parents?”
She’s not wrong, but… “My father was nothing like your father. He’d have never killed innocent people.”
“Maybe not.” She nods, and my rage dials down to a simmer. “But he didn’t approve of us?—”
“He didn’t know about us.”
She gives a small laugh. “He did when my father told him and your father wouldn’t approve of our match.”
I turn away, unable to face the truth. It's easier to hate her. Easier to believe she never loved me. Because if she did, if what we had was real, then I lost something far more precious than I've allowed myself to admit all these years. And my father played a part in it. That’s hard to accept. Could I have changed his mind if I’d told him how much I loved her?
But then I wonder out loud, “How did your father know? Did you tell him?”
She hesitates and looks away. “There wasn’t much I could do then, as now, that someone isn’t reporting it.” She returns her gaze to me. “My father is a terrible man. What he did is unconscionable. But I’m not him. Why do you punish me and not him?”
“You don’t think being locked in the basement is punishment? Would you rather be locked up down there?”
“Yes, I would,” she says without any doubt or hesitation. “Given the choice between being left alone in a quiet cell to being demeaned and humiliated as a sexual object that all your associates probably jerked off to last night, I choose a cell.”
The image her words conjure up make me want to kill every associate who leered at her last night. It burns in my gut that I’m the one who set it up. What sort of fucked up shit is that?
I turn away, running a hand through my hair, unable to face her, to face my shame. The anger that's fueled me for a decade feels different now, heavier, more complicated. It was easier when I could direct it all at her, when I could believe she was just as guilty as her father.
"Do you know why I'm so angry with you?" I ask, not looking at her.
"Because you think I betrayed you."
