Page 228 of His To Erase
She straightens, smoothing her skirt like she’s wrapping up a therapy session and not carving me open. “He taught me how fast love turns into leverage.”
I almost laugh because nothing about this is funny. “Why now?” I ask. “Why bring me here?”
She tilts her head like she’s weighing the truth. “Because you’re circling something you don’t understand. And he thinks you’ll get to it before he does.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
She smiles. “The girl.”
My entire body goes still. “Ani?” I whisper.
She shrugs. “Is that what she calls herself?”
She’s fucking with me. Or worse—she’s not. And that’s the part that twists deeper. It confirms everything I’ve been thinking for weeks. But hearing it from her mouth is a different kind of poison.
“You don’t touch her,” I snarl, teeth bared.
She doesn’t flinch. “I don’t have to. Frank’s already inside her head. You’re just the decoy.”
I jerk against the rope, and my vision flashes red with rage.
The decoy?
No. That’s not possible.
It can’t be. But the pieces are already shifting in my head, and they’re too fucking clear.
I thought I was closing in. Every move felt like progress—like I had him. But it was a lie. He was never running. He was playing with me. Keeping me busy while he bled her dry.
She was the fucking bait. Fuck.
My pulse hammers against the rope, pounding in my ears like it already knows what’s coming. I don’t know exactly what I’m walking into—but I know it’s worse than I imagined.
“She’s not part of this,” I grit out.
She leans in again, lips brushing the edge of my ear. “She’s always been part of it,” she whispers. Like I should’ve known all along.
I snap forward, headbutting her so hard the chair tips. Pain detonates through my skull, but I hear her stumble back with a grunt.
“Still got fight in you,” she breathes, wiping blood from her lip.
I spit on the floor. “You have no idea.”
But I’m outnumbered, still drugged, and the second guard is probably on his way back.
“Tell Frank he picked the wrong fucking girl,” I growl.
She kneels beside me, slow and graceful like a predator, and drags her nail down my cheek. The sting is sharp, but it’s not about pain. This is war after all.
“Tell Ani,” she purrs, her voice dipped in something colder than venom, “that the monster she’s running from sleeps in her bed.”
My whole body goes still. Rage pulses so hot behind my eyes I could fucking explode. I breathe through it, forcing my focus through the haze. She’s trying to break me.
“What did he do to you?” I rasp.
Her smile fades. For the first time, something flickers in her expression—loss, maybe. Grief? But it’s gone a second later, replaced by steel.
“He taught me how to survive.”
