A ragged breath comes back out, barely level, as I fall back against a wall and glower at her. Still so fucking pretty. But deceit. So much fucking deceit. And from the one person I trusted. Loved, even. I half laugh, a surprise at my admittance to myself. Love? I damn well love her. Too fucking late for that now, though.
Too late.
“Please, Benjamin. I…”
“You what?”
She takes a brave fucking step forward again, then another around the upturned coffee table. “I love you.”
I snarl at that. This isn’t what love does. Not that I’d fucking know, but it’s not my version of what the word should mean. I look away from her towards the stairs, remembering her giggle as I bit into her ass on the way up them. “I didn’t mean to. I shouldn’t have and I’m so sorry and now I don’t know what to do.”
“Stay away from me, Hope.” I can feel it now. The hatred. The animosity. Destroying this room's contents hasn't dampened any of my rage. If anything, it’s just woken it up, told it to forget the niceties we were trying for before all this shit began. “What was the fucking plan anyway? Make them pay?” Silence as she stares at me, lips moving around words she can’t find. I grunt at her wide eyes. Fear. She should hold that thought inside a while longer, let it bleed through her until she gets her ass out this door and runs for her life. “Make us all pay for our sins?”
She comes closer and drops her head, fingers reaching out for me. I watch, both disgusted and desperate for her touch as she grasps for me. Her hands travel up the front of my jacket and it sets a warning off inside my chest, like a bullet traveling through my skin. It pisses me off further,elevating the war that's fucking waging inside of me.
“Them. Yes,” she says. “Only them. Never you. Please, Benjamin.” Her eyes look up at me, glassy and so damn pretty as she begs. Fuck those eyes. Fuck her and her scheming. “I love you. I had to tell you. It’s the only way. Don't you see? Please. I'm on your side. I am. I know what saying all this could mean, but. . .”
I shove her hands away, backing her up against the wall and pinning her shoulders. I’m so damn close to strangling the bitch. I could. Should.
“What? What does it mean, Hope?” My teeth clench, jaw aching as I increase the pressure.
“That you’ll kill me. You’ve threatened it. I’ve seen you do it for so much less.”
Her words slay me more than they should, and I glare at the sensation they rile in me. She’s told me the truth knowing I might kill her for it, and what the fuck do I do now? I should. She's right. That's what I'd normally do for this type of betrayal. My memory casts back to the night I bruised her face with the barrel of the gun. The threats I made. It causes my fingers to tighten, confusion rendering me fucking useless in my own head. Kill her. Don’t fucking kill her.
My head pulls me out of the goddamn mess I’m in, and I back away from her before I put more pressure on her. The distance gives me some room to temper this mood back to controllable.
“The Yakuza?” I ask. Her nod confirms it, big fucking eyes lost as she looks to me and sobs out more tears. Fuck those tears. They confirm the treachery, show her as a person I don't know, never damn well have. Lies and deceit. From her. None of this has been real, other than the continued lies she’s managed so fucking well.
I can’t process it. Any of it.
I close my eyes and step back until I hit a wall. My head bangs against it, twice, hoping to find fucking sense as she keeps begging. My head slams harder as her moans and pleading continue, until the song of them makes me glare back at her again.
“I love you. I love you. Please.” She crawls to me across the broken debris of the room, uncaring and crazed in her frenzy to plead her case.
My damn fingers find their way to her hair of their own accord, itching to dig harder, pull tighter and show her the fury she’s unleashed. But they hover there as she keeps talking, barely touching her but unable to back off. “That’s what I’ve hidden, Benjamin. All of it. There's nothing else. Please, think about us.”
Try as I might, there’s still so much fucking rage inside me. I shake my head, knocking it again. So much hate and revenge snakes over my skin and through my blood. It’s pulsing with energy, like a bomb about to detonate in my mind. I can’t just let this go. What would we be if I did? She lied to me. Used me. No one gets away with that in my world, and she knows that. I'll kill her. I will.
“You wanted it. It’s there. I’ve told you,” she says, finality in her voice. “Do what you want with the truth, Benjamin. I'm done now.”
I look down at her, the hopelessness in her voice making me feel fucking sick for some reason, but she’s an unknown to me now. A person I’ve never known.
I force my hands away from her, shoving them into my pockets where they're safe and contained before I pull the beads around her neck and strangle her. The pounding in my ears rings through my mind. Why? I need to hear more. “Keep talking, Hope. Why?” I need to understand, because right now, I haven’t got a damned clue.
About any of her truths.
“My mother was a social girl,” she says, falling onto her ass like she's given up. My eyes close again at the vision, annoyed with it. “Maybe an escort, I don't really know, but she found love in the arms of Quinton Cane senior.” She chuckles, a hollow sounding attempt. “He promised her the world, then she fell pregnant. He told her to leave. Turned his back on her.” I nod, letting her words sink in behind the mist of rage that’s in front of me.
Standard procedure for men who have mistresses on the side. “She never got over him. He poisoned her heart, and that same heart filled my head with the same poison. The need to seek revenge, that it was all their fault. And then she… we needed money. Bills had to be paid. She couldn’t get out of her own drunken slumber, so she made me…”
My eyes finally open. “She sent you to the streets.”
Her small nod is filled with shame, but it barely registers.
The story continues. How her plan brought her to New York, how she worked her way into the graces of men like me with the sole intention of getting close to Cane. The years of planning. The time she took deliberating her next moves. The pain and suffering she and her mother went through, the life she had to lead to make ends meet in desperation. The hatred she took from her dying mother because of them, because of the loss of a man she loved. The whoring. The endless nights, some of which I knew about. And the way she felt when she first saw them at that dining table, laughing with us. The way her skin crawled as mine is doing now, knowing she was finally sitting in front of the men who had everything—finery, schools, a life of luxury—when she’d been given nothing but sadness and the scum of the streets. In my city. My city. A city I almost held in my control by the time I hit twenty-five.
The words and the tears still, but my mind and chest wage war.
