Page 115 of Oblivion

“Welcome to the psycho club.”

32

EVAN

Ilisten carefully as Sammy explains how she and Starling planned this entire thing. How they manipulated Drew into proposing, how they orchestrated the video call where she announced her engagement, and then how she and Starling planned Starling’s entire speech where she told me to do whatever it took to bring Sammy home.

With each word that falls from her lips, I grow colder and colder. She planned this. They planned this. They laid a trap, and I walked straight into it. I’m not the predator, I’m the prey, and instead of me slowly capturing her, she’s lured me in, then dropped a cage right over my head, and I had no fucking clue.

“Evan,” Sammy says my name, jolting me from my thoughts.

“You planned this entire thing?” I question, even though she’s already told me the answer.

“Yes,” she says boldly without a hint of shame. “Well,” she scoffs. “Except for the part where you drugged me, had my birth control removed, and got me pregnant.”

She has the audacity to sound angry, like she’s the aggrieved victim in this whole situation, not the fucking puppet master.

“Are you mad?” she snaps. “Because I can guarantee it’s not as mad as I am. You put a baby in me, Evan. I’m nineteen. I hada whole life planned, and a baby didn’t feature in my future for at least ten years. How could you do this?”

“How could I do this? You got fake engaged to trap me,” I growl.

Her scoff is full of derision. “You could have just left me alone. I didn’t force you to break into my room and start putting jewelry on me. I didn’t force you to do whatever you did to get Drew to break up with me. That was all you. All we did was create a situation where you were forced to make a choice. Lose me or claim me.”

“And I claimed you,” I snarl, prowling toward her angrily. “I claimed all of you, including your fucking womb, which is full of my kid. You’re mine.”

“You don’t get to make choices about my body. You drugged me and had my birth control removed. What if I’d have had sex with Drew? What if this was his baby, not yours?”

“It’s my baby,” I snarl.

“Of course, it’s your baby, but is that the only thing you’re interested in right now?” she snaps.

“No,” I rasp, my voice low and dangerous. “Right now, I’m preoccupied with the fact that my wife plotted with my sister to manipulate me into marrying you when you knew I thought us being together was a bad idea.”

Her lips snap shut, like she has no idea what to say, because really what the fuck can she say. She set me up, and I played right into her hands. I did exactly what she planned for me to do—at least up until I deliberately got her pregnant to keep her.

“Evan.”

Blinking, I stare at her. Who even is she? I was so blind because it honestly never occurred to me that she could do something so…so…psycho.

33

SAMMY

“Evan.” I say his name, but he doesn’t respond. Instead he looks at me like I’m a stranger, like he doesn’t recognize me at all. I tricked him. I planned an elaborate setup to force him to confess his feelings for me, and it worked.

He loves me, we’re married…and apparently, I’m pregnant.

I’m pregnant with his baby because, even though Starling warned me that Evan would take over my life, I never considered how truly insane he is, or how far he’d be willing to go to keep me.

“Evan,” I call his name again, but instead of speaking or even really looking at me, he stands up and walks away.

Blinking, I stare at the spot where he was. Evan has never walked away from me before. Even before we were together, he never left me. He stood on the periphery of my life and watched even as he refused to close the distance between us.

When Starling and I devised our plot to make him mine, we never thought about what he’d do when he found out what we’d done. I think a part of me assumed he’d be grudgingly impressed that we’d turned the tables on him.

Evan, Clay, Hunter, and especially Sebastian take great pride in being ruthlessly privileged alphaholes. It’s who they wereraised to be, and they’re proud of that. Although I doubt any of them would ever admit it, I’d lay money on the fact that most of their favorite moments are when they’ve successfully taken what they wanted, in whatever way they wanted to.

Between the four of them, they’ve crossed every single boundary that’s been set by the women they love, and even when they’ve felt bad about the fallout from their actions, they’ve never wished they could take it back, even if they’ve regretted the reactions they caused.

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