“Luke…” I kept my voice low. The last thing I wanted was to light a match that could ignite into wildfire—especially when his family might still have a chance to quietly control the fallout.
He shifted my way, closing the space between us, that damn muscle ticking in his jaw.
“I found out about something that you need to know.”
He didn’t speak, just waited for me to continue.
“My mom... she told me Dunn Industries is buying King Enterprises stock and properties through shell companies.”
Luke’s jaw shifted. His eyes darkened. There was something unreadable building behind them. A warning. Or maybe accusation. It hit like a door shutting quietly in my face.
He exhaled slow enough I felt it move between us.
“My mom works for Dunn,”I added for full disclosure.
He didn’t respond.
“I wanted to tell you, give you fair warning about what I’d learned. This time is different.” My voice barely carried, the weight of it settling like a brick wall between us. He knew what I’d meant—I wasn’t running. I was standing my ground, fighting alongside him. It wasn’t like before, even though he had no idea why I’d had to leave in the first place. I was choosing to let him in. To trust him with what I knew. To fight instead of run.
“Your mom works for Dunn.”
I blinked. “Yeah, I told you?—”
“It makes your intel suspect.” His voice was cold, hard, flat. “You don’t think Dunn would feed her misinformation? Use you as a pawn?”
The chill emanating from him cracked something in me. “That’s where we’re at?” My breath caught, betrayal slicing through me. “You think I’m being used? Or you think I’m working against you.” That last one wasn’t a question. The wall that fell over him told me my answer.
Luke’s jaw flexed, eyes fixed somewhere past me, as if I wasn’t even worth the direct hit. “You think I can ignore what my brother told me? What my family’s already laid out? Your mom stole from us. Now she works for Dunn. You walk back intomy life like nothing’s changed, and I’m supposed to forget where your loyalty lies?”
My stomach dropped. “You think I would sell you out? After everything?”
His gaze finally cut to mine, flint and fury. “I think you don’t even have to try. All Dunn has to do is pull strings, and your family dances. You can claim you don’t know, you can say you’re not part of it—but you carry their shadow. And I can’t let that near me again.”
The words hit harder than his silence ever could have. It wasn’t just distrust—it was exile. And it burned like betrayal.
“You wouldn’t trust anything that I tell you, would you?”
“I trust patterns,” he said.
I let out a hollow laugh that scraped my throat raw. “Patterns. That’s all I am to you now? A tally of every way I’ve already let you down? You don’t even see me—you see what you’re afraid of. And you’ve already decided I’m guilty.”
His expression didn’t change. “Right. Because a girl who fucked me over in the past knows how this ends.”
His rejection hit with the force of a riptide. My throat burned, my head spun, lungs clawing for air. “That kiss…” I shook my head, barely breathing. “Guess it didn’t mean a damn thing to you.” Because to me? It meant everything. Which only proved how stupid I’d been to let him anywhere near my heart again.
He stepped back, eyes hard. “Maybe it meant we were both stupid. Just for different reasons.”
He turned—no hesitation, no apology—and walked straight into the crowd, as if I hadn’t just handed him a piece of me I never should have given him. Like it was easy. As if I was disposable. Forgettable.
I replayed his words on a loop, each one slicing deeper.“All Dunn has to do is pull strings, and your family dances.”
He didn’t see me—he saw them. My mom’s paycheck. Her boss’s shadow. Every choice I made tangled in someone else’s agenda, as though even my breath belonged to Dunn’s plan.
It wasn’t just that he didn’t trust me. It was worse. He trusted Drew more. He trusted his family’s rules more. He trusted what had already happened more than me.
And that? That was betrayal. Because whatever else I’d done, I would never choose Dunn over him. Why would I? Because my mom worked for them? Because we needed the money and that was her only option? But Luke—he had just chosen the Kings over me.
My chest ached, splintered clean through. I wanted to scream, to hit something, to kiss him until he remembered—but all I could do was swallow it down and keep standing. Because breaking in front of him would’ve been the same as proving him right.
