Page 60 of Dirty Little Secrets
“You change your mind,” he rasps, “I’ll get you a house. White picket fence. Fancy SUV. The whole dream you girls fantasize about in the shower.”
He grins, and I want to claw his face off. He leaves out the rest. The violence. The drugs. The infidelity. The filth.
“I’m not interested in having kids, Brent.”
He steps back with a smirk. “Right. Because I’m not good enough.”
“It’s not that,” I lie.
Brent’s been living in a delusion with me for years. That we’re in love. That I’m his. I’ve become a master at pretending, and even I’m starting to forget who I am beneath the act.
“It better be,” he says, jabbing a finger just shy of my face. “Because if I find out it’s someone else, the only freedom you’ll get is when the flies feast on your corpse.”
Ice trickles down my spine.Thisis why I can’t get close to Xaiden.
Brent turns and starts for his bike. My shoulders begin to sag in relief. but then he glances back. “Get on.”
I hesitate. Just briefly. I glance down. No riding gear. The temperature’s dropped into the 60s. I’ll freeze, but I don’t argue. Not with him. I swing my leg over and wrap my arms around his waist, biting back the nausea that rises in my throat at being this close. The smell of his leather jacket reminding me of the late nights spent at the club.
He hands me his helmet, not because he cares—but because I’m only useful to him alive. He needs Xaiden’s security program. He wants to steal his network—leverage the mafia families and control the flow of drugs.
If I confess everything to Xaiden, I’m dead.
If I fail Brent, I’m dead.
There is no out. No savior. No knight in shining armor.
Just this.
Do what Brent wants.
Get the program.
Then disappear.
It's my only hope. And it's barely anything at all.
30
Istare at the screen long after the office has gone quiet. The cursor blinks, like it’s mocking me. Like it knows what I’m about to do. I slip the jump drive into the port, my fingers moving on instinct, muscle memory overriding guilt.
This is it.
I don’t do it because I want to. I do it because it’s the only way I get out of this alive.
Out of Brent’s grip even if it means betraying Xaiden for all the wrong reasons. But I need out of this suffocating half-life.
I tell myself I’m not doing it because Xaiden doesn’t care. That he never cared. That I was just a pair of thighs and a tight skirt he happened to enjoy looking at during work hours. I was entertainment until I wasn’t. Even as Red, it meant nothing. I was quickly replaced.
He pulled a woman looking like a model into his office and closed the door as proof.
It stung but I didn’t expect any less.
I click through the files like I’ve done a dozen times before, looking for the folder Brent wants. The one with the source code. To me, it’s just a lifeline in disguise.Lines of encryptedcharacters fill the screen. Protected, firewalled, locked down with layers of coding only a madman could have built.
Brilliant, brutal, and completely unreachable. Even when I’m pressed against a mattress, his cum dripping down my chin in a locked club room, he doesn’t seeme.
Just a body. Mask to use for his perfect illusion to chase so he didn’t have to see the real girl—raw, wrecked, desperate to erase the memories that haunt her.
