Page 126 of The Kiss of Deception

Fucking Charles and his fucking death wish.

In all honesty, I’m not surprised at all. I just wish I got more punches in, enough to actually break some bones.

“I understand he works for you.”

“Clearly it is not for me that he works,” I chuckle dryly.

My muscles stretch and strain against my skin, boiling blood pulsing in my veins and spilling in my mouth from under my teeth. They clamp on my cheek, hard and harder until I taste metal.

Then, I swallow all the rage down. I deserved every bit of its toxic sourness. I brought all these people into Zoe’s life, effectively putting these wheels in motion.

“Well, the calls that allowed us to track her were directed to several media outlets. She leaked your very scandalous images to the press—after uploading them all over social media, as I’m sure you know.”

All I taste is red blood.

“She insists she was instructed to do it, that she would never do anything that might hurt you. Again, I think you can guess who instructed her.”

As the relapse of my adductor injury threatened to end my season early, I’ve been preparing the announcements and officialization of my transfer. The timeline shrunk, and this must have been Charles’s last attempt to get his own way. He wanted to split me from Zoe, whom he blames solely for my choice, in hopes I’d jump to any of the other plumper offers to wipe my heartbroken tears with a fat check; expecting the public opinion would pressure me, too.

“It’s her word against his,” he says sympathetically. “Even if we prove she’s telling the truth, his involvement doesn’t stretch into illegal territory. He’ll argue he shared his personal concerns and whatever she did was on her own account.”

Fucking Charles.

After staring at the dirty wall above Jones’s head for long moments to convince myself not to take a page from Charles’s book and find some loophole on the law to make him pay for all he’s done, I jerk a nod and yank the door open. “Thank you. Please call me if—”

“I will. As I’ve promised all the five hundred other times you’ve demanded,” he shouts to my back.

The city is now in full bustle under the gentle autumn sun. Traffic delays my steps as I shove all the unsettling information in the back drawer to focus on my priority.

Zoe.

I can deal with everything else after.

The answers to my questions arrive with a ringtone—the hospital calls.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Zoe

For the first time since I moved away for college, I use my key.

Under the yellow glow of outdoor lamps, I unlock the door. My hands tremble as I close it with a quiet click, and the chronic smell of sugar coats my nostrils.

Chocolate cake, carrot cake, coffee cake… There was always some assortment on the table—Rosario’s way, whether she realized it or not, to fill the hole of absence carved by my parents.

Inside, the lights are mute, the walls silent, and I only stop when I’ve locked myself in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, with all the ghosts that used to hold my little hands.

With a click, rays of light pour from the lamp that hangs above the nightstand, dancing with the tiny specters of dust of a room no longer inhabited.

The shadows and silhouettes that once were my closest friends no longer feel close—familiar but distant, like the fleeting memory of a dream that evades me in the morning, long gone to some corner of the subconscious.

There is nowhere else to run, nowhere at all to hide from reality.

There were only two men whose presence never wavered from the moment they met me.

Life is stealing one from me. Lies, the other.

Behind fear and grief resides a sense deep of acceptance. Like this ending was always going to be the only ending—an end.

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