Page 60 of Twins for the Mafia Heir

Raleigh… I love- I love- I love-

“Raleigh?!” Achilles sits up, but I’m already stumbling off the bed. “What’s wrong? Are you-”

“Don’t call me that!” I gasp, clutching myself like I can’t hold my shattering body together. Every one of my nerves is a raw wound. I can’t catch my breath. I can’t escape the hollow forming in my own stomach. “That’s not my name!”

Achilles is on his feet, coming around the bed toward me, but those words stop him in his tracks. His face is twisted with confusion, but worse than that, he looks concerned. For me.

No, for Raleigh.

The woman that he loves.

“What are you talking about?” he asks. His tone is trying to decide between demanding and soothing, and instead just comes out wrong. Everything is wrong.

I feel the tears run down my cheeks before I even realize I’m crying. “That’s not my name,” I repeat. “It’s not- I’mnotRaleigh!”

Achilles shakes his head, straightening. The line between his brows is deepening by the second. His eyes scan my face like he’s looking for something he can’t find. “This doesn’t make any sense.” I can see the day we met playing behind his chocolate eyes, see the moment I claimed to be Raleigh Warwick.

His gaze flickers to the door, back to me, and then back again, as if he's trying to find something to anchor himself in. “This isn’t... this isn’t happening.” He shakes his head again. Denying the doubt he’s beginning to feel? Denying the words that I’ve said?

“Whoareyou?” he finally demands.

My tears are coming too fast. Achilles is becoming nothing but a watery shape in front of me, but that’s almost a relief. I can’t see what I hear in his voice. The incredulity, the rising anger, the betrayal.

“I’m no one,” I sob. It’s never been more true than it is now, after he proclaimed his love to a woman he’s never met while inside me.

“Tell me your goddamn name!”

I choke on it, but I manage to force it out. “Emma Clarke. My name- is Emma Clarke.”

Achilles says nothing. He doesn’t know who that is, because Emma Clarke isn’t anyone important, and never has been.

“I-I told you the truth,” I gasp out. “The pregnancy was… going badly. We weren’t sure if she was going to m-make it, but… It wasn’t Thomas’s baby being born. It was Raleigh’s.”

Achilles’s shape turns away from me. Now that I’ve started speaking, I’m practically vomiting up the words. I don’t believe in excuses, I never have, but Ihaveto explain. I have to make him understand.

“I’m the daughter of a nobody who worked in a mafia gang on the Warwick’s bad side. When my dad died I did the only thing I knew how to do. I lied and I stole and I tried to make enough money to get out. I- I ended up doing really bad by Raleigh, the real Raleigh, but she gave me a second chance. Thomas hired me, but- but even with the Warwicks I didn’t know where I belonged. I just knew that I had to make up for what I’d done!”

Achilles’s face is a storm. “Are you even twenty-five?” he asks, his voice hollow.

“T-Twenty-” I whisper.

“Fuck.”

He turns his back on me, apparently with nothing else to say. I struggle to breathe as he moves around the room, collecting his clothes and dressing in silence cold enough to kill. “I-I never meant for this to happen!” I cry. “I never meant for things to get so confused, I-”

I never meant to feel so much for you, and for Sidony.I never meant to find the place I belong… with you.

Achilles hasn’t stopped moving. I try to wipe my eyes and see he’s already fully dressed.

“A-Achilles?” I plead. My voice is so small and shaky I don’t know if he even hears it. And if he did, he doesn’t respond.

Will he leave me here in this hotel room without saying a word? Can he turn his back on me so easily? I clasp my hands together, and the scratch of my wedding ring on the inside of my finger shocks me.

“Achilles,please-”

“Get dressed,” he orders gruffly. There is no affection in his voice, no mercy, only hollow rage. “You’re going back to where you came from.”

Chapter 32

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