Page 87 of Cruel Dreams

She steps into my arms and starts to cry.

I hold her, full of regret. This would have been so much easier on both of us if I’d broken up with her. Then she would have had no choice but to meet her family. But I couldn’t. I can’t live without her. I’m the one who keeps telling her she can have me, and her mom, dad, and sister. She can, can’t she? I don’t know.

“I’ll wait for you forever. You have my promise. I’ll always be here, and I’ll always want you. When you’re ready, come home. Simple as that.”

But the penthouse isn’t her home.

She leans away and wipes her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Every time I find you, I feel like I lose you all over again.”

For her benefit, I force myself to smile. I can’t let her see how much this is shredding me. “I was thinking that too, but it only means we keep finding each other, right?”

I could go on and say endings are new beginnings or some other crap you’d find on a social media meme, but that would sound like bullshit, and she would know it too.

“Ready?” Banks asks, holding their boarding passes. “We should go. The line’s getting longer, and we don’t want to press our luck.” As an FBI agent, Banks doesn’t need to go through security at all, but he’s doing it to help Stella. When he called to arrange the flight, I told him this was only her second time flying and that she might need some extra guidance. I didn’t tell her, though. I don’t want her to feel like a burden. Besides, Banks is happy to do it.

He turns his back to give us privacy, and I kiss her goodbye, nudging her lips with my tongue, asking her to let me in. I lick at her like I’m a starving man and she’s my last meal, my hands tangled in her hair. She whimpers, and her fists crumple my shirt. I don’t care what we look like to other passengers, I only want Stella to know how much I’m going to miss her.

Reluctantly, I pull away. I tug on her ring and say, “Till death do us part, right?” Tears and already missing her scratch my voice.

She smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yeah.”

“I love you, Stella.” The words are so inadequate.

“I love you, too.”

“Good. Better go.” I clear my throat.

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.” She walks backward until she and Banks are swallowed up by a large group of people, and I watch them wait in line. He helps her through every step of the process, and after they’ve collected their things, I lose sight of them completely.

I wait until the departure board indicates their flight has taken off, and only then do I trudge to the lot where Douglas parked the car.

He’s subdued on the drive back to the penthouse.

Lucille’s quiet, and Zarah won’t leave me alone, my lonely little shadow everywhere I go.

Everyone hates Stella’s gone.

The penthouse is empty without her.

We don’t hear any news until Banks calls later that evening. He tells me he and Stella landed in Orlando without incident and that her reunion with her mother and father was everything I imagined it would be.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Stella

To keep my mind off the flight and obsessing over meeting my mom and dad, Banks tells me little things about the investigations and asks me more questions that have come up since Ash’s gala at the governor’s mansion. He types my answers into a laptop he brought onto the plane.

Zane didn’t want Zarah exposed to the gory details of what happened and we haven’t been watching the news at the penthouse. Banks’ information is a welcome distraction.

There were quite a few prominent businessmen in King’s Crossing charged with solicitation, and someone leaked the complete list of Ash’s clients to the press. The names don’t mean much to me, but I remember a couple Zane linked to the descriptions Zarah could remember, and I’m glad they’ll be punished for what they did to her.

The FBI disassembled the whole operation, and more than two hundred girls were released from Ash’s services. The agents who found us on the cargo ship also raided the apartment building where Nathalie lived and cleaned it out, and they shutdown the Black Cat Motel where she and I met Vance Huxley. It turns out that Ash owned that motel, too, and hidden cameras filmed the activity in every room. Banks says Ash turned the footage into raunchy adult movies and sold them on the dark web for thousands of dollars.

Ash knew I was with Nathalie the night she met Huxley. He knew for quite some time I wasn’t dead, maybe even from the exact moment Paulo pretended to shoot me. He thought he could play the game and win, but in his glee to put his hands on Quinn and me, he slipped up and didn’t realize Douglas had driven Nathalie to the club. The mistake cost him.

“Cocky criminals usually fuck up,” Banks says, nodding in satisfaction. “They think they’re God and can get away with anything. A lot of the time all we have to do is sit back and wait for it to happen.”

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