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Worse still, thanks to being stopped several times on my way here, I was several minutes behind Marcus, so God knew what he’d said to Scarlett already. Judging by their body language, whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t landing well with her.
God. Dammit.
Between the workplace harassment and the trauma she suffered last night, Scarlett had enough to deal with already. The last thing she needed was to be confronted about something that could land me in hot water. Nor did I want her pressured into lying to protect my ass.
Dammit, Marcus. I know you mean well but?—
I froze. Standing just outside her office—close enough to see through the glass partition, but far enough that neither spotted me—I felt my stomach plummet. My heart rate launched into some kind of a sprint while my brain tried to register what it was that sent adrenaline soaring through my system.
Maybe it was how upset Scarlett looked. Maybe it was how she stiffened and was backing away (why was she backing awaylike that?). Maybe it was the way that Marcus matched her step, either oblivious or callously indifferent to her body language, which demanded her personal space.
Maybe it was the tension in his shoulders, the anger I knew far too well.
Rationally, I could try to convince myself that their behavior was nothing more than a disagreement. A frustrated one at that. After all, Marcus wanted her to lie for me, and with how upset Marcus had been in that board meeting, perhaps he wasn’t asking nicely. Perhaps he was demanding, and a man demanding anything of Scarlett would not be met with happy compliance. Their animosity-filled body language and postures could theoretically be attributed to all of that.
Yet, somehow, I knew, at the cellular level in my body, something else was going on. Something darker. There was something about Scarlett’s body language, the look on her face, that shot a warning flare into the night sky.
And any doubt that my sixth sense was wrong evaporated when Scarlett made her next move.
She raised her palm up.
Hershakingpalm, in a defensive move reserved for a predator. And her eyes. Even though I couldn’t see their fine details from my position, I could absolutely see the fear in them. Fear that trembled down her arm as she continued backing away from Marcus.
My fingers balled into a fist.
I had only seen Scarlett West quiver two times. Last night, when I’d found her trembling under her desk. And briefly, the night her father, a dangerous abuser, had shown up.
Even then, she’d done a great job of swallowing that fear because after everything Scarlett had been through, this woman was not easily frightened. In fact, she railed against terror like it was a cancer that threatened her very identity.
And yet she was clearly afraid of Marcus.
Marcus. Who was advancing toward her as she backed away,now holding two palms up in a plea for him to stop. Marcus, who didn’t holdhispalms up in a silent assurance that he wasn’t going to hurt her.
I took a step forward, only to be blindsided by my assistant materializing in front of me, babbling about the board waiting for my return. Her voice faded to white noise as I fixated on the scene unfolding through that glass window. Something primitive and protective roared to life inside me, drowning out everything but the sight of Scarlett’s fear and Marcus’s predatory stance.
Luckily, he’d stopped advancing toward her, but he looked every part the hunter cornering prey.
And in that moment, a sequence of memories crashed into my consciousness like dominoes, each one triggering the next in a devastating chain reaction. Tiny little moments that had occurred throughout the years where I had cocked my head or arched an eyebrow. Things that had felt off, but never big enough to suspect the man who had protected me, the man who had saved me from prison, might not be the savior I’d cast him as on that dark night in college.
Or maybe he was my savior. But maybe he was also a predator. If there was one thing I learned from having the complicated brothers I had, uncovering the secrets they thought they’d hidden so well from me, it was that a human being was perfectly capable of having two sides to their personality: light and dark. Hell, I was the poster child for that duality. So, why had I been so willfully ignorant when it came to Marcus?
Like how Marcus could never seem to keep a girlfriend. As soon as they would get close to him, they would break it off, block him from social media, and cast him as a pariah. I’d chalked those incidents up to angry ex-girlfriend behavior. And I’d dismissed his subsequent derogatory, condescending remarks as those of a jilted ex-lover who had been dumped.
And then there was the way that he would look at women. Constantly. Chronically. Un-freaking-ceasingly. Luckily, he’d always kept his eyeballs in check at the office, but anytime we wentanywhere public, it was like his gaze was an addict looking for its next fix in the curves of a female. But all men looked, I’d told myself. It wasn’t like I had some universal metric for the appropriate percentage of time someone should spend looking at the opposite sex.
But there were other incidents. Like the time he walked up to the bar, and while he waited for his drink, he turned his attention to that redhead to his left. I watched from afar as he said something to her and put his hand on her shoulder. I remembered thinking it was pretty bold to touch someone he didn’t even know, but I had chalked that up to how flirtatious he could be, and I chalked up her recoiling from him and walking off to a humorous rejection of Marcus. When he returned and called her a “frigid bitch,” I’d slammed my glass down on the table and told him to never talk about women like that. For a second, there had been a fire in his gaze, like how dare I chide him, but he’d quickly apologized. And he had been drunk, I told myself. But that night, that one little episode had bothered me more than the others. It had almost felt like he had let his mask slip, and I had seen a side of him that he had tried to hide from me.
But by the next morning, I convinced myself that it had been nothing more than a bad night. He’d been drunk, had said something he didn’t mean. End of story. Further, I reminded myself that Marcus had been a loyal friend to me, had forgiven me for the unforgivable. So, who was I to claim a moral high ground? Even thinking about it had made me feel like an arrogant asshole, so I’d stuffed that down too.
And there were other more recent moments that also clicked into place. Like how Scarlett changed her mind about the NDA clutched in her hand. In hindsight, it had happened shortly after Marcus made an appearance. Or how one of Scarlett’s interviewers for that promotion would likely have been Marcus. How unfathomably tight-lipped Scarlett had been about identifying her tormentor … almost likewhoit was, was more important than what they’d done.
This was when all of those pieces finally fell into place. Moments that I shouldn’t have dismissed.
Because standing here now, with all those thoughts going through my head in the space of a few heartbeats, I knew something with absolute clarity: Marcus was the one who hurt Scarlett.
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SCARLETT
