She finally pulls into her driveway, and my skin vibrates with impatience.

I’ve waited too long for this. There will be no finesse about it. Soon, in moments, I will be vindicated. Whether she believes me or not.

She steps from the car and I’m already there, grasping her arm, slamming her car door closed. She can’t move fast enough for me.

“Whuh—oh!” she shrieks.

“Quiet,” I hiss, and drag her up the stairs to her second-floor front door. “Open it.”

She stares at me, a little frozen, a lot scared—her wide eyes flash in the light of the porch lamp. When she’s frightened, it feeds my desire to make it worse. I want her scared.

I take her keys from her hand. “Which one is it?”

“It’s a—a keypad.”

I see the lighted numbers above the knob. “Type it in.”

Her fingers bounce on the keys as she types. A red light flashes and beeps. “Shoot.”

I push her aside. “What’s the damn number?”

She says it, and I get the door open. My hand on her back, I push her inside and move to flip the light switch, but the room automatically lights to our movement.

I have to pause. I knew it would be extravagant from the outside but seeing it in person still makes me pause.

Gauzy drapery around enormous bay windows, the sparkling view of the moonlit ocean the focal point of the great room. Ceilings aloft at least twenty, maybe thirty feet. Furniture and kitchen fixtures matching and sparkling like something out of a rich and famous world.

“Sit.” I point to the nearest chair, a dark wooden one, part of a pristine dining room set.

“The security alarm.” She points to another keypad on the wall.

“Code?”

She tells me, and I disarm it.

I turn back and she’s seated where I told her, her complexion whiter than ever, though I didn’t think that possible. Her skin is the palest I’ve seen on a Californian.

She stutters, “What are you—how is—uh—”

I sit next to her at the head of the table. “How much do you know?”

“About?”

“Him.” I snarl. “Malcom Vandershall.”

She gulps, her throat working over a swallow and shakes her head, as in Don’t make me hear this. She looks scared enough to pass out. The last thing I want is for her to scream at me to leave the condo and for all the neighbors to come running.

“Was he violent?” I hedge, trying to see how much she knows, trying not to show that there are still things I don’t know.

“Never.” She breathes once and her eyes drift. “Well, to me anyway. With Blake it was different. I don’t know what happened.”

Blake is her brother.

Her brows scrunch. “Do you know—”

“I know everything there is to know about you.” Except what’s inside your head.

Her breathing quickens and her voice catches. “So . . . what else?” She tucks her jean-clad legs against her chest and wraps her arms around them, like she’s protecting herself.

She looks like a wounded bird, who I’m about to crush. The truth will do it as well.

I lean toward her. “My sister was a student at his university.” My voice shakes, my hands clenched on the table. I can’t say this part—what he did to Louisa—without a monstrous surge of aggression. It’s a reopening of the permanent wound in my chest that most of the time I pretend isn’t there.

Her breathing stalls as she watches me. “Say more.” It’s almost like she knows. Or thinks she knows.

She doesn’t.

I want to drip it out in drops, drag out her torture. I want to see her writhe in emotional pain. I want her to suffer almost as much as her father should have suffered.

I shift my eyes to the window and take two breaths to regain control. “Louisa died because of him.”

“How’d she die?” she whispers.

I can’t stand the weight anymore—the feel of the bomb in my hands is too hot not to drop.

My heart skips beats, my raw voice scrapes like on a metal file. “He raped her.”

Her breathing stops and her face goes blank.

I wait. For it to sink claws into her purity. For it to register on her weak mind. For the horror of the truth to warp her reality.

Her jaw slowly descends and her mouth silently shapes the word “No.”

My pulse throbs in my ears and there’s a glimpse of it, the thing that I’ve longed for, the satisfaction I’ve craved. “More than once.” I am the villain here. And I want to be.

“You . . .” She gasps on a drawn breath, and her next sound shocks me back in my chair. A cry is ripped from her throat. “You lying sack of shit! You’re a liar. A liar. A—LIAR!” Her mouth works on more words that don’t come. Only raw sounds tear from her throat, more animal than girl.

She leaps from her chair, her hands shield her face. She paces, mumbling to herself, “Lies, all lies. So many lies.”

With a fury I do not expect from someone who’s no more than five foot two, she launches at me. I fall back in my chair. I thud on the floor, knocking the wind from my lungs.

She squeezes my throat, her little fingers scratching my skin. “Take it back! You—you—” Insults not coming to her, even at her most enraged. She spits in my eye, clogging it, and it drips down my face.

“Agh!” I roll and pin her to the floor. “Enough!” I use my shirt to wipe her spit from my face, then capture her scraping fingers on either side of her head.

She screams and shouts, “Liar!” over and over. Her sounds aggravate me. They strike at old memories I never want to remember. She bucks against me, trying to throw me off.

I anchor both her wrists in one hand and silence her mouth with the other. “Shut up.”

She doesn’t listen. She screams and cries, muffled by my hand. She kicks the floor behind me.

Her protests echo in my head, reverberations of the worst horrors from my childhood. I loom over her and shout in her face. “Shut up!”

She silences. Her chest jerks in hiccups matching the rhythm of her breath gusting onto my hand. In a re-enactment of the hundreds of times I’ve fantasized this moment, tears spring from her eyes and pour noiselessly down her face.

“Listen,” I growl. Her eyes glaze with tears, so I’m not sure she even sees me. “Do you hear me?”

She closes her eyes and turns her head away. Her breath catches and stutters. If I hadn’t shouted at her to shut up, she’d be sobbing.

“If you promise not to scream, I’ll pull my hand away,” I say, unsure where the brush of compassion comes from.

She doesn’t open her eyes but nods. I take my hand away and move it back to her wrist to hold her in place. Her gaze returns to me and whimpering cries echo in her throat.

“It’s not true.” Her tears leave shiny trails to her ears.

“It doesn’t matter if you think it’s true.” Nothing will stop me from getting the justice Louisa deserves. “Your job is to give me what his shit lawyers robbed my sister of years ago.”

“W-w-what do you want?”

“I want your trust fund.” And revenge. On you.

Her eyes gawk. “That’s—”

“Fifteen million dollars. I know. I also know how big your father’s retirement pay is.”

“But that money is for the hospital.”

I grin, a malevolent grin, the delight of seeing my prediction of her reaction come true. “Which is why you’re going to give me what’s in your trust fund. Because if you don’t, I’ll tell the whole world—the hospital, the university—what a raping monster your father was. Then what would happen to his precious retirement pay and your mother’s hospital?”

Panic shakes her voice. “You have no proof. They won’t believe you.”

“I have plenty of proof. By the time I’m done, his name will be so dirty the university will sever ties, and the hospital will be forced to refuse his money.”

Confusion crisscrosses her face. “You wouldn’t.”

I lower my mouth to her ear. “Yes, I would.” Now, I get to mete out the worst of it. Or the best of it, in my opinion, the part that will allow me to torture her, to own her misery. The best revenge on the father.

“I can’t just give you the money from my trust,” she mutters. “It’s not a bank account I can withdraw from. There are conditions.”

“There’s one way your trust will allow you to give me the money.” I keep my mouth next to her ear, listening to her breathing quicken next to mine. I wait for what I’ve said to click, then she gasps like I knew she would.

She knows.

I lift my head. Her pulse flutters in her neck. I want to taste it, to feel her fear on my tongue, to seize her pain and own it with my mouth. I want to inflict on her all the torture that has lived in me ever since my sister died. To wreck her with more than mere words.

“No,” she moans. “You can’t make me.”

“You have no choice.” The tears have dried from her face, replaced by the fear that I crave so much.

“I can’t marry you,” she murmurs.

“You can and you will.”

Then I do something I never imagined doing. Something that was not part of my fantasy. At all.

* * *

His lips crush mine, and the horror of everything he said disappears.

My father. His sister. The money. The hospital. Marriage?

He’s reinforcing it all—with his mouth, willing me to believe it, forcing me to admit I have no control.

I moan a low primal sound into his mouth, and sink my teeth into his lip. The growl from his chest resonates like a challenge, and he sets loose his tongue in my mouth.

Shamelessly, I open wide for him and let him take me the way I’ve wanted since he first stared at me. It’s devastating, it’s disarming, and I can’t remember to breathe it’s so good.

And bad. So very, very bad.

Which is exactly why I never want him to stop.

The duel between our slashing mouths is fueled with hatred, pain, and some other more visceral thing that has to be lust—though it’s of a potency I don’t recognize.

His lips are lush against mine, his tongue like fire burning the tears from my throat.

His hands caging mine stoke my fear, higher, tighter, until I’m euphoric. He could do anything to me and I wouldn’t stop him. I arch under him until my nipples graze his chest through my shirt. I gasp and his lips wander from my mouth to my ear. His teeth sink into my lobe, making me hiss.

A ringing. A dinging sound.

“Damn it.” He jerks back from me like I’ve burned him.

I crawl across the floor to my purse and answer my phone. “Amisha,” I answer. “It’s fine. I’m fine. We’re fine.”

“Penny, you don’t sound fine.”

I realize I’m speaking too loudly, too quickly. I’m frantic, panicked, afraid—and so bitterly aroused that my brain is as swollen as the rest of me.

I force myself to speak slower, quieter. “It’s okay. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t,” the male voice behind me growls.

“I mean . . .”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“If you’re sure . . .”

“Bye!” I fake as much happy in my tone as I can and hang up.

I stare at my phone, terrified of looking up, of seeing his face. But I hear him breathing, I see his legs bent on the floor, from the corner of my eye.

“Don’t. Tell. Anyone.” His voice is hollow and distant.

“I won’t.” Like I want even Amisha hearing the things he blames my father for. Like I’d admit to anyone I’m being blackmailed into marriage for my trust fund.

My hair curtaining my face, I peek at him through the strands.

For once he isn’t looking at me, he’s staring at his hands. I tuck my hair behind my ear. It’s the first time I’ve looked at him when he isn’t looking at me. Strain threads his brow and mouth. The sharp chisel of his jaw is marred by the muscle grinding his teeth.

He stirs and it’s like a beast awakening from slumber. I instinctively cower, give him room, though I don’t know what I’m afraid of. There is nothing I’d want more than for him to kiss me again.

If it weren’t for the whole money/wedding thing.

He stands, but I stay folded on the floor, not wanting to confront him. His eyes—I still can’t say what color they are. I forgot to think of it when he was on me.

His voice rumbles like thunder from a passing storm. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” He turns to leave.

“Wait.”

He pauses but doesn’t look at me.

There’s so much to ask him. I can’t see through all the questions in my head. I clear my throat and pick the first one. “What’s your name?”

“Logan.” Then, not slamming the door but slowly closing it behind him, he leaves.

Logan.

My mind caves in on itself. The things he said, the lies he told. He’s a terrible man. Manipulating me for my money. Forcing me to marry him so I’ll inherit my entire trust fund and give it to him.

I don’t know how he knows that. But I know I can’t give it to him.

I can’t marry him, no matter how hot he is, no matter how much my lips are still tender from his bruising kisses.

But his lies about my father . . .

Why would he make up such horrific things? The kind of man who would do something like that . . . he could’ve at least made it something believable. Something less traumatic and gruesome. He’s out to shock me is all.

But for a reason I don’t understand, his lies, what he said, a piece of it fits. Something about it resembles what I’ve needed to know. It would explain . . .

No. It explains nothing, because it’s all lies.

Knowing it doesn’t make it easier, though. I shrink into the corner, grab a pillow from the couch, and hug it to my chest.

The grief—it’s there. The pain—it’s here. Maybe if I focus on what lies Logan’s going to tell me tomorrow, I won’t have to feel it.