Page 11 of Heart of Stone (Dark Billionaires)

“But it won’t be!” she pushed away from him. “I enabled my father foryears. I took out credit card after credit card to keep his stupid fucking club open. I saved every penny I could to help him, to allow him to invest in his business. I sacrificed a decade of my life to help him, and he was using it all to…” She choked in a breath, unable to finish. “I facilitated the abuse that went on in his club. I’ve wasted my life, Warren. I thought I was helping him through his grief. Instead, I allowed him to…”

He attempted to soothe her as she hyperventilated. “You didn’t know.”

“Ignorance is not an excuse.” Her cheeks were shiny with tears. “Even before this morning, there was no point to my life, Warren. The debt wasburyingme. My father has never cared about me. Aaron was always his favourite. Even when Talbot was touching me, Dad was more concerned about them damaging Aaron’s stupid fucking photograph than he was about me.”

Warren didn’t say anything, letting her get everything out. He simply stroked her hair, letting her know he was listening.

“I have no one. There isn’t a single person that gives a shit about me. The only people that contact me are from fucking debt companies about missed payments and defaults. The only people that ever visit the house are bailiffs or Dad’s dealer. And Dad digs me deeper with every move he makes. I just… I don’t see the point of it anymore, Warren. The best apology I can give those women—thosegirls—is to… to…”

Kill herself, Warren realised.

“Just let me go,” she begged tearfully. “Let me have some peace.”

Rhys’s expression was tortured as he looked on, as white as Warren had ever seen him. Had it been anyone other than Kate in his arms, he would have checked to see if his friend was all right, given Rhys’s history with suicide. But all Warren could spare him was a grim look, devoting his attention to the weeping woman in his arms, murmuring platitudes into her hair and making affectionate passes over her skin.

This was his fault. He’d treated her as a suspect from the get-go. He’d given Talbot and Braxton free reign in collecting Paul and his anonymous bookkeeper. Even when he’d discovered the bookkeeper was Kate, he hadn’t stop for a minute to wonder at her guilt, to wonder if she might be innocent.

To wonder if it might be the straw that broke the kitten’s back.

3

Kate

IthadtakenKatean age to remove all the tablets from their blister packaging, cracking each one open only to carefully arrange it in a mandala-like formation. She’d fiddled with her little piece of art, shuffling it around like a picky child playing with their food.

Only to come to the conclusion that she didn’t want to kill herself. She just didn’t want to continue living.

No, that wasn’t true. What she wanted was to never have existed at all.

Perhaps her own personal fairy godmother could come and take her life and give it to someone who needed it. An equitable compromise. Kate would cease to exist, and someone else would get to live.

“I need to take a Zoom call,” Warren said, looking up over his laptop screen. He sat at the desk in his bedroom as she rested on the armchair in the corner, gazing listlessly out of the window.

Kate nodded, uncaring. He’d barely left the room since finding her little art project laid out across the coffee table, working at the desk in the corner and sleeping on the sofa. From what she’d been able to ascertain, Warren owned a company. Or part of it, anyway.

She recognised one of the voices on the call as the man who’d flushed her ex-mandala down the toilet. Rhys. The kind, regal-looking man with high cheekbones and striking amber eyes. The other two were strangers, distinguishable only by their accents; one Scottish, the other from the Home Counties, just like her and Warren.

The figures they discussed were insane. Throwing around so many millions that she was sick of hearing the word. Sick with jealousy. Sick with hate.

Had she sunk so low that she apparently hated anyone doing better than her?

Yes. Yes, she had.

Exhaustion swamped her thoughts. Kate closed her eyes, curling up against the stupidly expensive armchair and letting out a long sigh. The photographs of those poor women flashed through her mind like awful, horrifying fireworks. She grimaced, trying to shake away the thought.

She flinched as Warren’s broad hand encased her shoulder, coming out of her reverie.

“Are you all right?” he asked. On the desk, his laptop was closed, his business meeting clearly over.

“Fine,” she said dully.

Warren checked his watch. A heavy, expensive watch with a black leather band and an emerald green face to match his eyes. “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

Kate felt like a spectre walking through Warren’s house. With the exception of her trip down to the cellars the morning after her arrival, she hadn’t bothered to leave the bedroom. Warren led her down the pale golden corridor, taking her down a set of curved marble stairs that ran alongside a row of arched windows looking out over the garden.

If it could be called a garden—it resembled a golf course, with islands of mature trees and a striped lawn that some poor gardener must have spent hours creating. Come to think of it, he probably wasn’t that poor if he had this much work.

It was the kind of house that she’d only ever seen when scrolling through houses for sale online, the ones that were so far out of her budget it was laughable. It would only ever depress her, but she did it anyway. A moment’s reprieve from her misery.

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