Page 85 of Accidental Vegas Vows

“Sign,” I repeated, and the nausea shifted into something worse, something painful, traveling up my esophagus and cracking my chest.

He hesitated.

Reluctantly, his fingers grasped the pen from where it sat atop the papers. One by one, he signed his name and initials, following the guide I’d laid out of my signatures. Over and over, Damien Blackwood littered the pages. I didn’t speak again until the last page was signed and dated.

“I spoke to Ethan before we left,” I said flatly. I couldn’t even bring myself to feel — I’d done too much of that in the last few weeks. “He’ll set the date so we can appear before the judge.”

“Please just?—”

“We’re done,” I added, and oh, no, I still could feel. The words ripped a brand new hole in my chest, just beside the bigger, gaping one he’d dealt when he’d hidden this from me.

His gaze met mine in a flash. “We’re not,” he breathed.

“We are.”

“I meant every fucking word I said in court,” he pushed, setting the pen down on the open papers and standing up to his full height. “I don’t want to lose either of you.”

“You’ve already lost me, Damien.” I meant for it to be scathing, but it came out slightly broken, and I could see the crack in his features as that realization sunk in. “I think you knew that two weeks ago.”

A beat of silence passed and the glassiness of his eyes doubled. “But you stayed,” he rasped.

“For Noah. I stayed for Noah. I did this, for Noah,” I explained, my voice warbling. I’d barely given myself space to consider how leaving both of them would affect me, and I could feel the icy tendrils of dread and despair beginning to slither inside of me. “I’ll miss him. So, so fucking much, Damien. But I can’t do this with you.”

I stepped around his desk, and before I could even try to make it to the door, his hand caught me around my wrist, pulling me back, pulling me closer. “Please don’t do this,” he croaked. “He needs you. I need you. Everything I did, the lying, the hiding it from you, meeting with Ethan without your knowledge, keeping you out of the loop — I did it all for him, and it was so fucking stupid of me. I never wanted to hurt you.”

“You chose to do it that way.”

“I know.” His hand tightened around my wrist and he pulled again, trying to bring me into him, but I held my ground. “I have never regretted anything more in my Goddamn life. I care about you, Olivia. Far too much, if I’m being honest.”

“Then say it,” I demanded.

I’d heard him in court. I knew exactly where he was going before he changed course. I knew they were there, but I also knew he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words, and if he couldn’t, then it wasn’t true.

“Say it, Damien.”

His mouth popped open, his eyes flicking between mine with uncertainty. Hesitation, and then nothing.

“I understand why you did it,” I sighed, slipping my wrist out of his grasp. “But it’s done. You got what you wanted. We agreed to an expiry date, and it’s here.”

“I don’t want a fucking expiry date,” he choked. “I want you.”

“I’ll leave before Noah gets home.” I swallowed, and there it was again, that splitting, aching pain in my chest that bloomed from the thought of how Noah would handle this. Or maybe it was from him saying the thing I’d been hoping he’d say before I found the papers. Either way, it burned me, leaving little left except extinguished embers. “I’m sorry, Damien. But it’s done.”

Chapter 34

Damien

Handing the paperwork over to Ethan might have been the hardest thing I’d ever done.

I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew there wasn’t a single chance of me changing her mind, not now, probably not ever. But every part of my body had physically recoiled when Ethan’s open palm faced upward, expectantly awaiting a handful of documents.

A part of me regretted giving them to him. That part of me, horrible and disgusting and thinking only with his heart and not his head, wanted to keep them and run away somewhere she’d never find me. It wanted to convince Ethan to keep her tied up in the legal system for years, wanted to cherish the only fucking thing I had left of her in privacy somewhere in the Himalayas, wanted to take Noah with me and homeschool him and lose my mind. But I wasn’t that horrible.

I was just very horrible.

“You’re beating a dead horse,” Carrie said, her gaze locked on the flickering streetlight in the distance. The warm, dark blue hues of twilight were fading rapidly into nightfall, and the rolling hills were beginning to disappear against the horizon. She sipped at her glass of wine. “You can’t undo what you did. You’ve fucked up, you've felt bad, now you’ve got to get back up.”

“I can’t just get back up, Carrie,” I sighed. “I am the lowest of the fucking low. She did everything — everything I asked of her, bent over backwards, tore herself to pieces for me. And the one thing she asked of me, I avoided doing for her.”

---