Page 87 of A Smile Full of Lies
On the inside? I was crawling out of my fucking skin.
Every line of code, every network ping, every progress bar crawling across my monitor was another second I wasn’t with her. Another second I wasn’t looking her in the eye after tearing her open over the phone.
Because he’s mine.
Those words had hit me like a drug. I replayed them on a loop all afternoon, strung out on the sound of her breaking. I’d hunted her through silence and questions, cornered her until she confessed the one thing I’d wanted for years. Not a slip. Not lust. A claim.
Mine.
And God help me, hearing it had nearly undone me. Predators weren’t supposed to get drunk on their prey’s surrender, but here I was.
I knew I was her type. I’d known it since we were eighteen, slouched on my couch with a massive popcorn bowl between us on Wednesday nights. I’d watched the way her breath caught for the wrong kind of men on the screen — the ones in masks, the ones who smiled while they stalked, the ones who made obsession look like devotion. The ones who blurred the line between romance and ruin.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew exactly what that did to her. I wasn’t just Knox, the boy next door. I was the fantasy she’d been wetting her lips over all along.
And now she’d admitted it. She saw me as hers just as much as I saw her as mine.
By the time the update was stable, and the last alert cleared, the sun had already dropped behind the skyline. My tie was loose, my patience long gone, my knuckles aching from gripping the edge of my desk too hard. I snatched my truck keys like they’d been burning a hole in the wood.
The garage swallowed me, headlights cutting a path to the Bayway. The bridge was slick black under my tires, Mobile Bay churning dark beneath it. Lights streaked past, my reflection in the glass of the dash warped and feral. I drove too fast, knuckles white on the wheel, every mile closer to Stonewood making the coil inside me wind tighter. Every mile east was a mile closer to the only thing I could think about.
Ros was waiting for me… in my house. Probably wearing one of my sweatshirts again, too, if I had to guess. She loved stealing my clothes, and I loved nothing more than seeing her wearing them. I was still riding the high of the fact that she’d begged me earlier — well, begged Nox Obscura — and admitted she didn’t want anyone else to have me.
By the time I reached Stonewood, I wasn’t Knox the cybersecurity CEO. No, I was the thing that had been pacing all goddamn day, trapped in my office like a caged animal. I was the predator who was starving for another taste of the truth.
I got back from Mobile just after dark, the dashboard clock ticking over to 7:14 p.m. as I killed the engine. My porch light was on. Ros’s silhouette flickered behind the front blinds. She was home.
Good.
She had no idea how close she’d come to being hunted again.
I slipped inside, careful not to make too much noise, loosened my tie, and made straight for my command center — the office off the den where I kept my most private work terminals. The moment the door shut behind me, I sank into my desk chair and pulled up the system logs from Stonewood Manor.
I didn’t have to search for long.
There she was… Ros, flickering across the screen in dim purple light, breathless and flushed. Pausing at the edge of my childhood bedroom, her fingertips ghosting across the frame of my senior portrait.
“I wish it was you who just made me come, Knox.”
I froze. Didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
I’d watched the footage three times already on my phone in Mobile. But watching it now, full screen, high-res, sound turned up just enough to catch the way her voice cracked? It did something to me.
She wasn’t just craving a masked stranger. She was cravingme. She just had issues admitting it, even to herself.
My hands flexed against the armrests of my desk chair. The silence hummed with tension, and the only thing sharper than the need pounding behind my zipper was the knowledge that she wasright here, now, in my house, probably twenty steps away, if that.
I leaned back, slow and deliberate.
The deck was stacked. She just didn’t realize I was the one who had rigged the entire fucking game.
Time to let her know I was home. I eased out of my office and padded toward the sounds of movement in the kitchen.
The scent hit me before I even made it across the threshold: roasted garlic, herbs, the rich tang of tomato simmering on the stove. A deep, savory heat that curled low in my gut and made something primal stir beneath my ribs.
She was making homemade minestrone. My favorite soup. I rounded the corner and stopped dead in the doorway.
She was barefoot, standing at the stove with her hair twisted up in that messy knot on top of her head that she always wore when she cooked. One of my old sweatshirts was drowning her frame, worn soft and hanging off one bare shoulder. A pot steamed on the stove, and she stirred it slowly, hips swaying just slightly to the low hum of whatever grunge track she had playing on my stereo.
