Page 62 of Confusing Cade
“Since we reconnected, sabotaging the Promenade has been your only goal. The worst part is you almost got away with it.”
Sabotage? A plant? “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I should have expected this.” He laughed without humor. “I mean, look at what you did for a living. You sold yourself on FanZone.”
The bitterness and cruelty were too much to ignore, too much to dismiss. And the problem was much more than his words. The problem was the way he said it as if he wanted to burn me.
I stood. “That was out of line. That was unfair.”
“From where I sit, it’s very fair.”
“No.” I shook my head, the motion frantic, desperate, as if I could shake away the words he’d hurled at me. My heartbeat thundered in my chest, a wild, erratic drumbeat that made my ribs ache. “If you think I’m a whore, just say it.”
“I think I already have.”
Cade’s voice was ice, each syllable a shard that pierced deeper than I thought possible. This wasn’t the man I’d known, orthoughtI’d known. The Cade I’d laughed with, confided in, whose warmth had once felt like home, was gone. Disappeared. In his place stood a stranger with eyes so cold and detached that they seemed to strip me bare, leaving me exposed. Raw. And brokenhearted.
“If that’s what you think of me,” I said, my voice cracking under the weight of the hurt, “that breaks my heart.” The words felt like they were torn from my chest, each one laced with a grief so sharp that it burned behind my eyes, threatening to spill over. My hands trembled at my sides, fingers curling into fists to keep from reaching for him, for the ghost of who he used to be.
“You’ve made me more than angry,” he shot back, his tone flat, unyielding, like a blade slicing through the last threads of hope I’d clung to. “You’ve gutted me.”
The air between us felt thick, suffocating, as if it carried the weight of his accusation and my shattering heart. My throat tightened, a sob clawing its way up, but I swallowed it down, the effort leaving a bitter ache in its wake. Every memory of us crumbled like ash in my mind. The pain was a living thing, coiling around my chest, squeezing until I could barely breathe.How can he look at me and see something so ugly? How can someone I’m falling in love with reduce me to this?
We stared at each other, and I knew by his expression that no matter what I said next, Cade had already made up his mind. There was nothing I could say or do.
Nothing I want to do. Not with him. Not like this.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
He flinched, but the rest of his expression remained rigid and unwavering. “Goodbye.”
I walked out of the room without saying anything else.
And I barely made it to my car before the first tears fell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CADE
“Fuck,” David said from across the conference table in my office. “This is some shit.”
I sat back, frustrated and angry. “Chris is very good at what he does.”
“But she denied it, right?”
