Third a Kiss

We could have been forever.

With a tummy-clenching grunt, Sully backed away from me. He balled his hands against the tug of togetherness. He revoked fate’s incessant pull.

Stubbornness ought to be a sin.

A deadly penance-earning, hell-inducing Biblical sin.

Then again, stubbornness could also be confused with pride. The way Sully braced his shoulders, standing tall and majestic, and embracing what his goddesses called him—an emperor upon this island—the more I didn’t know if it was pride that Sully refused to shatter or his stubbornness.

Either way…it would end whatever we had.

Yanking his phone from his trouser pocket, he planted his legs into a fortifying stance and typed on the small screen. He typed for longer than usual when loading me into Euphoria.

He typed so long that I grew impatient.

I wanted this over with.

I wanted some pill to swallow to remove him from my head and heart.

I wanted a drug—

Wait…

He didn’t give me elixir.

I looked up, studying him as he continued to type. His jaw set and eyes tight. His forehead furrowed with signs of his emotional exhaustion and inflexible stubbornness.

How had he forgotten to give me elixir?

And why did that worry me the most?

My heart kicked with worried flutters.

You know why.

I reached for the harness clasp around my waist. Sully typed a final sentence. His nostrils flared with pain.

Wait.

Wait!

I didn’t want to be sent to a guest without being high on elixir.

I didn’t want to have to sleep with someone as me and not an animal drowning beneath disgusting lust.

That lust kept me safe.

It turned sex for them into sex for me.

It gave me power. It gave me sanctuary. It gave me peace from my thoughts and allowed my body to rule.

Without elixir, I wouldn’t be mentally intact afterward.

I’d be broken.

Well and truly shattered and precisely what he wanted me to be.

His to use, abuse, and command.

Sully looked up, his thumb hovering over the button glowing on his screen.

I opened my mouth.

To beg for something I never thought I’d want.

Give me elixir, damn you.

Don’t gift me to someone and ask me to fuck them as me.

Eleanor wasn’t capable of being a whore.

But Jinx could.

Jinx had.

Jinx—

“Let’s see if you’re different, Eleanor Grace.” Sully raised his hand, the phone condemning me in his grip. “Let’s see, once and for all, if you can be trusted.”

“Sully, no—”

Too late.

His thumb came down.

The sensors blinded me, deafened me, stole me.

White.

Silent.

Nothing.

Chapter Eighteen

 

I WAS THE MASTER of sniffing out lies.

Thanks to Drake’s firm tutelage when we were kids, he ensured I’d learned that lesson very well. When he pulled me in for a hug because our parents walked into the room, I felt the fakeness of his embrace. When he shared his dessert because our mother glowered at him over the table, I tasted the phony sugar. When he punched me in the goddamn face, only to kiss my cheek as a concerned brother when our father caught us, I throbbed with the bruises of forgery.

Thanks to him, I knew every feeling of a lie.

The weight of it, the heat of it, the sound of it.

All lies had the same construction. The same level of hypocrisy mixed with beguiling misrepresentation. A lie was worse than any other danger because your own mind wanted so much to believe it. It wanted to accept the smarmy untruth, to believe the counterfeit tale.

It took discipline to see past such a thing.

It took ruthlessness to punish the liar.

After a while, I used lies to my benefit. I played games with those who thought they were masters at deceit.

I made them think I accepted their bullshit, all while waiting for a time to reveal the hand of cards I’d been steadily gathering against them. Each time I chose to prove their inability to hoodwink me, I had a winning hand. And each time I played such a game, the loser never had access to me again.

Either in a personal relationship or business.

Cross me.

Lie to me.

And you’re dead.

On paper to start with, but push me, keep trying to convince me that I was the one in the wrong, and then you’re dead in reality too.

As Eleanor slumped in the harness, her eyes snapping closed and chin crumpling to her chest, I suffered a pang of unease.

Thanks to her, I had a conscience these days.

She’d been another teacher in my life, just as my brother had.

She’d taught me the signs of heartbreak.

The taste of bitterness, the ache of wrongness, the awful, nasty understanding that no matter how you felt about someone, they could still double-cross you. You couldn’t control them. Couldn’t stop them.

She had her own thoughts and feelings. Her own beliefs and convictions. She believed them so strongly, she almost convinced me of her lies.

Strangely, it wasn’t the monster inside me who’d constructed this little game to sniff out her truth. The monster had already thrown his stupid heart at her and given her the key to every shred of trust he had left.

But the monster didn’t have an excuse. After all, it was an animal—a beast driven purely by instinct—who’d chosen Eleanor for its mate.

It was the man who’d loaded her into Euphoria.

The man’s last-ditch attempt to survive her. To prove that she was a liar. A thief of his fucking heart and the best con-artist he’d ever met.

It didn’t matter that her lies didn’t taste right or sound right or showed any of the normal revelations of a fib. It didn’t matter that I already knew she spoke the truth.

Adam Marks had heard her name from me. Not her.

Thanks to my lack of security and obsessive desire to be inside her last night, I’d caused this mess.

If anyone deserved to be punished…it’s me.

And that was exactly what this was about.

This little game wouldn’t break Eleanor.

It would break me.

And when it did…every single piece would be hers.

And she could either leave me scattered by her feet or gather up what was left and sculpt me into whomever she wanted me to be.

Because if this worked, I would be free.

Free to trust wholeheartedly.

Free to love completely.

Free to be happy.

And if it didn’t...

Well…Hell already had a throne waiting for me.

Chapter Nineteen

AS FAR AS FANTASIES went, this was a tame one.

I stood in the middle of a hay barn.

The sweet scent of harvested grass, the natural heat from fermenting bales, the dust motes shimmering on the air from the sunset spilling through the windows at the top of the huge A-frame building.

It all spoke of calm country. A slower pace of life for a city lover, and a world away from a tropical island in Indonesia.

Spinning in place, I drank it all in. Stables waited for equine guests by the large double wooden doors, a tack shed held a multitude of saddles and bridles, and a mismatch trophy wall held sun-bleached photos of someone galloping, running barrels, and smiling in victory with ribbons.