“Are you crazy? You can’t just keep threatening people however you like. Vin’s got nothing to do with this. Or me. He has a boyfriend.”
“You believe I care about that?”
“Why else would you want me to leave? You aren’t that difficult to detect, you know.” I tried my best to be casual with the words so he could prove me wrong, but suddenly, he seemed to be more angry at himself than at me.
“So?”
I blinked in shock. “You admit?”
Damn, I thought after what I did plus the years that flew by, his infatuation with me would have died, but he still had it in him. Did he even ‘love’ me? Was it just love?
His glare pierced my flesh and soul. “Don’t think for a second that it’ll stop me from ruining you.”
It will.His eyes...he didn’t just love me. It was obsession. He was obsessed. And he was irritated that he did. If he truly was, that meant our first encounter here wasn’t really our first. He’d been with me all these years. What...how...what had he been doing?
“Have you been watching me?” It took a lot not to stammer.
“You two should get a room or something! Kids are walking everywhere.” An old lady walked by, kept ranting on about what we were doing. We weren’t doing anything, our bodies weren’t even touching. Though it may seem to someone else like we were about to kiss.
“Have I? Looks to me like you’ve gotten it all figured out. Next time, I won’t tell you to leave his house. He will be doing the talking.”
“Stop being an asshole. Want me to spell it out for you? He’s gay. He’s myfriend.And you just said you don’t give a fuck. Why should it even matter to you? It’s my fucking life. I hate that house, especially because you can sneak in anytime—”
“You’ll find out who and what I give a fuck about very soon,” he cut me off calmly. “And you’ll be surprised how high you are on that list.”
He pushed himself away, his gaze briefly brushing my legs. His jaw ticked as if refraining from saying more, then strode off to my right.
“Don’t you dare touch Vin, you hear me, asshole!”
Fuck.
9
THEON
She makes me want to kill Vincent.She called himVinfor fuck’s sake. I should not be furious.
I should not be furious that she reduced and referred to that piece of shit asVin.But I was. She’d never said my name before—not once in all those years. Not back then, and not now.
She often referred to me as ‘hey’, ‘uhm, hi’, ‘excuse me’, ‘you’ and so on. Yet, she was so possessive of him like he was her one ticket to heaven. She was alone with two guys for a week. Two grown ass men. Vincent wasn’t gay, he was bi. There was a difference. He had a girlfriend two years ago.
I didn’t care if they’d been friends for three years. They weren’t really in touch until she came back to this town. Thanks to me. I wouldn’t sit still and let them cuddle, hug and shit just because he was gay. He had a cock, and that was the point.
I ran my hand through my hair and hissed, pacing the edge of the lawn as the repairmen moved in and out of her house like worker ants. How fitting. Fixing what I’d broken, patching up the mess I’d caused—ironic, really. I cut her water, killed her lights, all to force her hand, and now here I was, supervising the same repairs. It was laughable.
They were tearing into the kitchen first, peeling away layers of worn-out tiles, patching the leaks that had plagued her plumbing for months. The clanging of tools and the murmur of the workers should’ve been satisfying. Instead, it grated on my nerves.
One of them called for me, holding up some pipe as if to ask for my approval. I waved him off, my attention elsewhere, my mind still tangled in the vision of her hugging him—Vincent—like he had any right to touch her.
The electricians were in the living room, rewiring the place, making sure every socket worked perfectly, restoring the power I’d deliberately stripped away. And still, it didn’t feel like enough. They were scrubbing her walls, replacing the peeling paint, fixing the water pressure in her bathroom—everything. Her house had been on the verge of falling apart. And I was patching it up, like an idiot.
I wasn’t doing it for her. Not really. I told myself that. This was about control, about making sure she couldn’t turn to anyone else. Especially not him.
I let out a bitter laugh. Pathetic.
The obsession had never gone away. It just lingered in the background, waiting for a chance to sink its claws back into me. One look in her brown eyes, one touch of her skin when I had my hand around her throat—that was all it took. I was back where I’d started. Worse, even.
The beast inside me had stirred, awakened. And now, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it hidden. It wanted her. It craved her. It needed her. Everyday was a battle. I was so excited for this stage, but if I knew facing her would be this hard, I’d have kept tormenting her from behind the screen.
