Page 66 of Let Me
“Who fucked you?” His words caress my face. His breath is hot on my skin, minty.
“Caden. Let her go.”
One hand still in my hair, Caden rounds on Benji at his back. “This has nothing to do with you,” he growls to him.
“Let her go.”
I grab Caden’s wrist, dig my nails into his skin, fight against the part of me that wants this, even still. He whirls back around to me and steps back, eyes narrowed. I let go of him.
“Fuck you,” I say with as much loathing as I can muster. “Fuck you. You’re too wrapped up in your own self-pity to—”
Benji steps in between us as I realize I’m yelling in Caden’s face.
We’re both breathing hard, Caden’s eyes glistening in the darkness and he looks at Benji’s hand on my chest and says, “Don’t touch her.”
Benji scoffs but drops his hand. I grab my bag and turn to go.
“You never deserved him.”
It’s the last thing Caden says before I walk out of his house, slamming the door behind me.
TWENTY-NINE
Present
I TOLD her she never deserved him.
I meant it. She deserved me. She still does, and I don’t care that it makes me a sick, twisted fuck. I don’t care that my own mother might disown me. I don’t give a flying fuck what anyone has to say because Riley Larson deserves me, and I want her.
More than anything else in the world, I want her.
Even if I hate her, even if I still haven’t decided if I’m going to show that video to my father…I still want her. These fucking games we play…they just go to show me more and more that she’smine.
I have shit to do. Mergers calling my name. Clients to return emails to, words worth millions of dollars that I didn’t get to today, because I was thinking about this moment. Work I’ve neglected. And I don’t give a fuck about any of it.
No. Instead, I want to know what she meant when she said she got fucked too. There was something she wasn’t telling me, something that made her eyes go dark. And goddammit I didn’t mean to hurt her, and maybe I did want to scare her a little, but fuck Benji for not letting me get her to tell me.
To talk to me. Confide in me.
Fuck him.
As if he’s in my head he says behind me in the kitchen, “You’re just going to let her go like that?”
I grip the edges of the marble island to keep from lashing out at him, too. Benji might be a dangerous guy, but tonight he’s acting more like me when I’m not being a psycho.
And his words...they hit me.
But I can’t go after her. That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to fuck her over, and we got the video. We did that. I need to let her go. I need to burn her life up, watch as it goes down in flames.
So why do I feel like I also want to be the one to help put out the fire?
“If you don’t go after her,” Benji says, and the way he says it, I turn around to meet his dark eyes, “then I fucking will.”
My gaze narrows on him, even as I see the darkness beyond the wall of windows at his back. She’s out there. Alone. I don’t know if she has her phone. But The Villa isn’t far from here. She’ll be okay, I tell myself. I don’t care if she isn’t, I tell myself.
“Is there something you want to say to me?” I ask Benji, jaw clenched.
“We have the video. It isn’t her first. And she deserves the hell that’s coming to her. Every bit of it. But,” he clinches his fists and there’s a murderous calm in his gaze, “someone hurt her, man. And you need to find out who it was.”
