Page 1 of Tempting Fate

PROLOGUE

LILY

Aged: Nineteen

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“Angel, angel… are you going to forgive Alex?” The woman trots alongside the barricade that’s set up to separate us from the crazies lined up outside the courthouse. She yells her questions like a reporter, but I know she’s one of them. “Will you finally admit that you’re lying about him? That this is a love triangle gone wrong.”

“Fuckin’ psychos,” Sander grumbles from behind me.

“Needa be put outta their misery.” I squeeze Zeke’s hand to remind him that he can’t act on his lethal inclinations. “What kinda bitch thinks a rapist needs defendin’?”

“Sad bitches, that’s who.” Slash keeps his arm around my neck and my face pressed into his wide chest as he helps Zeke lead me inside. Sandwiched between my boyfriend and our gigantic bestie, I can barely see a thing. “Like to see them survive the bullshit they’re throwin’ at little Cherub.”

Their determination to shield me from this mess is futile. After a year of attacks by the media, haranguing depositions from lawyers employed by Joseph Kingsley, invasive medical tests, and four major surgeries, I know that this isn’t the end. This is simply another interlude. A new way for Alex to taunt me.

Because he refuses to exit my life.

Notwithstanding his guilty plea, my tormentor has done his best to drag out the legal process. He’s fought his mental health diagnosis. Broken his bail conditions by sending me letters. Leveraged the blackmail photographs of Sander by anonymously releasing them on social media two days before training began. Ordered his group of female devotees to hound me. Sat down for print interviews and given magazine exclusives about the “truth” of our relationship and a convoluted explanation about how his guilty plea doesn’t actually mean he is the perpetrator.

About the only thing Alex hasn’t stooped to so far is setting the Maddison clan onto the Shamrocks.

Thank God for small mercies, I guess.

Since my final surgery four months ago, and my permanent discharge from the hospital, Zeke, Slash, and Toker have tried their hardest to keep me in the dark about it all.

To no avail—not in this hyper-connected day and age.

Even so, I appreciate their efforts.

Which is why I don’t have the heart to tell them that I’m aware of the tricks Alex is likely to employ when we’re face to face again shortly. This court appearance might ostensibly be for his sentencing, however I’m cognisant that it’s another opportunity for him to use the microphone the legal system has thrust in his face to beat me down emotionally.

His gang of female supporters have hardly been subtle about their plans for today.

Before I deactivated my social media accounts a few months ago, comments like the ones thrown at me by the woman sprinting alongside the barrier were a daily occurrence. As a girl raised to believe in the sisterhood, discovering that some women will sell out their sisters for a man’s attention has been a hard lesson. If it wasn’t for Nadia’s complete loyalty, the sisterhood provided by the Moscato & Monet club, and the support of the Shamrocks’ old ladies, my faith in women would be gone.

Because Alex’s female supporters are vicious.

They call themselves “the chosen Cherubim”. There’s over ten in the main group, along with twenty or so other members who float around on the periphery. Most of them have grown their hair long like mine and dyed their hair blonde or purchased wigs to get the same effect. They pile their hair into high, messy buns, stick blue contacts in their eyes, dress in tight, low-cut tops, and body-hugging jeans, and pose with Harley-Davidsons they couldn’t even start, let alone ride.

It’s their “Jezebel ensemble”.

Apparently, their clothes and behaviour are supposed to shame me into freeing their leader.

As part of their public shaming, they film themselves reading Alex’s letters to me, all the while displaying a “Property of The King” patch on the vests they wear. With disturbing regularity, they post the videos online and in the social media groups they run. Sometimes they even take out full-page adverts in the paper to “set the record straight”. One of them runs the “Angel watch” blog that reports my movements. A few of them regularly meet with Alex at the mansion where he’s supposed to be on tightly regulated home detention. Every interaction is filmed, edited to make Alex look like a victim of my maliciousness, and distributed to as many public sources as possible.

It’s a circus. One I can’t seem to avoid, especially when they hide out on my university campus and ambush me as I leave class. None of the dozen restraining orders I’ve been granted have been upheld—not a surprise since Joseph Kingsley runs the police. My legal team, led by the Shamrocks legal eagle, Gabriel Abaddon, tries to keep me out of their sights, but these women are relentless.

And so is Australia’s media.

Too many so-called journalists, those self-purported professionals whose job it is to spread the truth, have shown their arses to count. They’ve brought into the whorish daughter of notorious biker uses the #MeToo movement to take down the upstanding son of anti-corruption politician narrative being pushed by Alex’s team. And when that hasn’t been enough fodder to keep the clickbait hounds raging, they’ve added new rumours to the mix.

Day after day; they manage to stoop a little lower.

Rehashing Slash’s case.

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