Page 95 of The Villain Edit

Pity she wasn’t home.

She’s trash, who cares?

OMG, did you see the pictures

She probably did it to herself.

My stomach twists again. I can’t look at the photos. The crude words written all over her bedroom wall.

Her bedroom.

Some creep was in there, touching her things.

The violation of her privacy shakes me to the core, but the fear of what might have happened had she been home…

David shrugs. “You said you didn’t want to hear about her unless it was an emergency.”

“This is an emergency!”

He shrugs. “For her, yes. Not for you.”

“I want to know, okay?” Even now, even after everything she’s done.

“Well, I’m here on my day off because you need to see this.” He hands me his phone with a grim look on his face and I am so sick of this I swear to god I’m going to throw the phone on the floor and break it.

Ashley Foley’s Attempt at Seducing Nic Fontana—At His Wedding!

I am a dead man if Rose thinks I leaked this. I drop onto the nearest chair and force myself to read the article for any clue how this got out.

I read it three times and I still don’t understand. The language is unclear, but it reads like the source is Ashley.

“It wasn’t you, right?” David asks hesitantly.

I shake my head.

He sighs, relieved. “Then it has to be Ashley or someone very close to her.”

“Why would she do this to herself?”

David takes a seat in the chair across from me. “I don’t know, but she’s knocked you out as a trending topic. I spoke to Rose—I had to swear on my mother’s life you weren’t behind this, by the way—and she agreed we should be cautiously optimistic. Ashley’s dumpster fire is drawing attention away from you at the moment.”

I frown at the photo in the article. It’s the one of us from the wedding, Ashley leaving the room. Someone has Photoshopped Nic over me and it makes me bristle. “Do you think she did this on purpose?”

“I loved you, for whatever it’s worth,”she’d said.

Is it possible she meant it? That she did love me? If that’s true, then I’m wrong and everything I’ve said and done is unforgivable.

“I doubt she’d make this kind of mistake on accident,” David says after a moment. “But her motivations might have nothing to do with you.”

Right. Ashley could be up to anything. She wouldn’t blow up her life to protect mine—it doesn’t gain her anything.

“You’ll do just fine here.”

Those words keep haunting me. But I can’t be the bad guy. She’s wrong.

Ashley is up to something.

Since I can’t trust anyone on my team to tell me anything about her, I devote what little free time I have to monitoring her social media. For three days, there’s nothing. Her last post is a photo of her in that jumpsuit, with the commentNew opportunities. What opportunity was that? She said she’d lost it thanks to me.

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