The words tasted like ash.Her chest ached, but she forced a smile that flashed bright but was as brittle as spun sugar.A woman could only take so much.
Cheri studied her for a long moment, then sighed.“So, that’s why you bailed on the treasure hunt?”
Xia’s smile turned razor thin.“I had no interest in watching him feast on every ‘treasure’ he found.”
“Can’t imagine he was thrilled about that.”
“I didn’t give him the chance to be.”Xia shrugged, the movement was casual but too practiced to be believed.“I vanished.Poof.Like a bad magic trick.”
Cheri barked out a laugh.“Clever girl.”Her voice softened.“You okay?”
Xia looked out at the ocean, where the waves rolled in like an endless, indifferent tide.“Not so much,” she said.“But I will be.”
Xia
Rex’s private beachvilla, Pearl Paradise...
The path to Rex’s house stretched before her like a serpent’s spine of crushed stone and flickering light.Xia’s steps were unsteady, not just from the alcohol she’d forced down—no, the real poison was the ache in her chest, the way her ribs seemed to splinter with every breath.The garden lights blurred into halos around her, mocking her with their false warmth.Fairy lights for a fairy tale.But she wasn’t the princess in this story.She was the fool who had believed in the happy ending.
“Well, sure as hell not with him,” she mumbled.She had loved him.“No, not had...I still love him.”
The realization snapped in her gut like a venomous scorpion.Her fingers curled into fists with her nails biting into her palms, hard enough to draw crescents of pain.It wasn’t enough.Nothing was enough to drown the hollow ache in her chest, and the way her ribs seemed to cave inward around the absence of him.She loved him, and he—
A shudder wracked her body.She pressed a hand to her sternum, as if she could physically dig out the bond that had formed between them that night in the cage.The way his soul had twisted into hers, and how their breaths had hitched in time with each other.She had known—deep in her bones—that he had felt it too.
“Except I fooled myself.He felt jack shit!”
The words tasted like copper on her tongue.She had seen the way he looked at her sometimes—like she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve, rather a problem to be managed.But never like she was his.Never like she was enough.
She stumbled as her heel caught on an uneven stone.For a breathless second, she thought she might fall.But no.She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her broken.Not like this.
An hour.That’s all it took that night.An hour of him cuddling her close before severing the last fragile thread of hope.She had known it for weeks—that it was a trick of desperation and her own pathetic need to believe that someone like him could want someone like her.
And tonight, he was going to prove her right.
Just thinking of him bringing another woman here to the beach house, of the way his hands would move over her body and the way his voice would roughen with pleasure—was a blade twisting in her gut.But maybe that was what she needed.Maybe the sight of him with another woman would finally burn away the last of her foolish hope and sever the bond from her soul.
She swallowed hard, forcing the tears back.She refused to cry.Not for him.Not ever again.
“So, I’m going to stay awake and watch him fuck another woman.That way I might just be able to finally send him to hell...and walk away.”
The soft vow chased after her in the night air.The path seemed to stretch endlessly, and the fairy lights blurred into streaks of gold as her vision swam.She quickened her pace, desperate to reach the beach house before the pressure of her own thoughts crushed her.
Xia froze as she felt it—an invisible shift in the air.Her breath hitched, and her fingers curled into the fabric of her dress.The back of her neck prickled with the same icy dread she had felt that night after barhopping with Cheri.That night, she thought someone had been watching her.Following her.
No.Not again.
She turned slowly.Her pulse beat a staccato drumbeat in her throat.The path behind her was empty—just shadows and swaying palms.The distant crash of waves was the only sound.But the silence was wrong.Too heavy.Too aware.
Her skin crawled.
“You’re imagining things,” she reprimanded herself softly.
But she wasn’t.
A twig snapped.
Xia’s breath left her in a rush.She spun and looked around with her heart hammering against her ribs, but there was nothing.No one.Just the whisper of the wind through the trees and the distant hum of the ocean.
