Page 27 of Judgment Day

Followed by nine years of lies.

She cleared her throat, straightened her shoulders, and lifted her chin. It was a tell of hers, almost as if she needed to remind herself where she came from, a show of strength. Her faraway tone disappeared and was replaced by complete indifference, as though she were telling me about a book she’d read. “Winston started ignoring me less, treating me better. So, I found a second girl. And that seemed to please him even more. The more girls I found, the more he began to treat me as an equal.” She folded her hands in her lap, one on top of the other. Proper. Composed. And then she pinned me with a cold stare. “He made me a queen.”

What good was a crown if you had to sell your soul to wear it?

I felt sick. The miles stretched further. The distance between our souls grew longer.

She was there. She was right fucking here, sitting across from me, close enough for me to touch. Less than three feet separated us, but it might as well have been a bottomless abyss.

“How many innocent lives have you sacrificed in the last nine years?”

She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that once they’d finished using those girls, they just let them go.

She pressed her lips together. “How many lives have you taken to get on top? How much blood is on your hands?”

“None of them were innocent. We are not the same.”

Sadie scoffed. “I promise you, none of those girls were innocent. There was a process. A screening.” There was no remorse in her voice, no shame as she stared at me.

I stared back, searching for the tiniest glimpse of the Sadie I thought I knew. “You seduced them.”

She untucked her legs from beneath her ass and sat up straight. Her expression was full of mocked innocence, her lips slightly parted and eyes wide. “Don’t look at me like that. Do you have any idea what it takes to earn respect as a woman in a world ruled by men? It was me or them, Grey. You said it yourself. Whatever it takes to survive.”

I deserved her anger. I deserved her pain. I’d done this to her, to us, and I’d endure the consequences of that. But those girls—they had nothing to do with it. “Putting other lives at risk isn’tsurviving, Sadie. It’s becoming the very monster you ran from.”

“You say that like you’re so fucking noble. Winston told me about the girl, about how you fucked her in front of all of them. I guess he thought it would make me jealous, but all it did was make me sick. You’re one of them, Grey. You took that girl. Humiliated her. Held her against her will for four fucking years. If I’m a monster, then what does that make you?”

My breath caught in my lungs. My jaw tightened.

“I never hurt her. I never laid a fucking finger on her outside of—”

She stood up, cutting me off. “Of what? Of what you had to do tosurvive?” She huffed a laugh. “You’re a goddamn hypocrite. All of you.”

I stood up, too, a pit of rage burning inside me. “And you’re not? You lure girls into the same life that broke you.”

Sadie stepped forward, poking a finger at my chest. “Youbroke me, Grey. You. I waited for you. I prayed for you.”

“I was in prison for five fucking years. And I told you why I needed time after I got out.” I hated that I was yelling at her, that we were yelling at each other. Our voices carried over the walls lined with bookcases and bounced off the twenty-one-foot ceiling. Our angry words painted the tall windows and blanketed the dark wood floors. We were surrounded by bitterness and resentment. I never wanted this. I wanted sweat and skin and moans. Never this.

She dropped her hand and took a step back, rolling her eyes. “Right. To earn your place.” Her sharp gaze met mine. “But you had enough power to save the girl. Why couldn’t someone else choose her? Why did it have to be you?”

Because someone else would have raped her, hurt her, broken her. Because the minute I saw her, saw the fire in her spirit, saw the way she defied Kipton, I knew it had to be me. Because someone else wouldn’t have had the strength to give her back.

“You chose her.” She walked around the back of the sofa, peering over her shoulder at me with a shrug. “So, I chose me.”

I placed my hands on the back of the chair, bracing myself for the storm I was about to drag us both into. “And what about Liam? Who chose him?”

She stopped walking and spun to face me. “What about Liam?”

“Did he find out what you were doing? Is that what he was going to tell us the day he was killed?”

She moved to the window and stared quietly out into the gardens.

I read people. I was good at it. She’d been so defiant until now, so eager to defend, hungry to project her anger on to me. Truth simmered in the silence. No answerwasan answer.

I steeled myself. “I saw the van at the airport, Sadie. It was the same fucking van that was in the driveway today. The same vanyouwaved a young girl into.”

“They were just supposed to take him,” she said without turning around. Her words sliced through my blood like cold steel. “Then you all showed up and they panicked.”

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