Page 129 of Sinful Desires
Confusion pinched at my chest, soft and fluttery until it turned into a blade. That was the second time he’d called me a liar.
He stepped back and looked at me.
“You wanna punish me?” he said, voice low and cracked. “Go ahead. Test me. Burn me. Put me on my knees. Parade every woman on this planet in front of me. But don’t stand there and pretend you didn’t know I’d crawl through fucking fire to get to you.”
I stared at him, pulse wrecked, breath uneven, lips parted. “You?—”
His mouth curled, bitter and cold. “Shut that pretty mouth, Scarlett. Because nothing will change the fact that I’m still yours.” His voice dropped. “Je t’appartiens comme tu m’appartiens.”
I turned around and reached for the door handle breathlessly, but not before hearing him say something that threw a dagger into my chest.
“You were patient number 16482.”
His voice scraped down my spine. I drank it like poison, knowing it would kill something soft in me.
That number wasn’t supposed to mean anything to anyone but the doctors who had drugged me.
But he’d memorized it.How?
I opened the door.
“The second I got out, I never missed a day, Scarlett.”
And suddenly I wasn’t standing in a strip club anymore. I was back in that horrible white room. Alone.
Except I never really had been.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
? Voltaire
Théo
One year ago
The cell door slammed behind me, metal grinding against metal like it enjoyed the sound of my failure.
Cold air punched my face as I stepped outside, sharp and dry, scraping across skin that still stank of bleach, sweat, and steel.
Anything was better than the piss-slick floor, the cracked walls, the choking stench of men left to rot.
A week inside.
Seven days of peeling paint, screaming silence, and the same loop of memory beating like a war drum in my skull. Scarlett—sedated, restrained, erased.
And I had been too fucking slow.
A black SUV waited at the curb. The engine idled low, smooth and arrogant. The door opened before I reached it.
Lazzio leaned out. “Good to see you, LeRoy.”
I got in without a word. The heat inside made my skin crawl. It smelled of rich leather and recycled air, too clean, too artificial. My jaw locked until my teeth ached. My wrists still burned from the cuffs. I sat there in silence, rage thick beneath my ribs.
“Where is he?” I asked, my voice flat and hollow. “Harper.”
