“Do you…or do you not…work for Dylan Decker?” he asks calmly.
“I do not,” I answer.
“Try again,” he says, and my jaw drops.
“Excuse me?!”
“Stop lying to me, Annelise. You work for Dylan. You were sent in to apply for the assistant job so you could get close enough to me that you could persuade my dancers and waitresses and clients to leave me for Dylan Decker. In the end, you make enough money to support yourself and you and Dylan’s son.”
“That’s insane,” I say, my voice cracking.
“Is it?” he asks.
“Yes, Luca is not his son. He’s yours.”
Chapter 38
Damien
“Get out.”
My words are as sharp as razor blades, and I know it, but I don’t care.
“Excuse me?” she asks.
“I said, get out,” I repeat.
A moment later, I hear her heels clicking across the floor and down the hallway to the elevator. I run my hands through my hair, holding them there on my head for a moment while my eyes dart around the skyline out the window at nothing in particular. The rapid movement keeps me from getting upset while I throw every wall back into place, this time higher, thicker, harder.
“What was that all about?” Diego’s words are not welcome right now, and I grit my teeth.
“Don’t ask,” I say.
“It sounded pretty heated. Don’t tell me you two are having your first fight.”
The last thing I feel like doing is humoring him right now, but the casual amusement in his voice has me seething. It doesn’t help that my heart is slamming into my chest like a car crash onrepeat. I whip around to face him, and my expression knocks the smirk clean off the asshole’s face.
“Jesus, Damien. What happened?” he asks.
I open my mouth to say something, to yell, to get some of the pain out of my chest and into the open, but I don’t know what to say. Because honestly, I don’t really understand what happened.
“She lied to me,” I answer after a moment.
Diego closes the door and crosses the room. “About what?” he asks.
“Everything,” I answer. “She’s our snake.”
I expect him to fly off the handle. To freak out. Or at the very least, for him to make some kind of expression of surprise. But instead, Diego just looks lost. “Ellie is the snake?” he asks, and the words come out as if they don’t quite fit. “You think Ellie is the one Decker sent in to fuck us? The one giving away trade secrets and pulling the dancers and clients out?”
“I don’t think, I know,” I say as I plop down into my chair.
“How do you know?” he asks, taking a seat in front of me. “Did she say that?”
“Of course not. She denied it from top to bottom. But I know she is because it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
In the moments of silence that follow, I stew over it. The idea of it, of her going behind my back, of working side by side with that joker, of duping me since day one, of possibly still being involved with him while she was involved with me…I can’t. And the idea of Luca being that man’s son…even worse.
“I think…and I might be over stepping here…it’s the only thing thatdoesn’tmake sense,” he says. “I think there must be a missing piece here. Someone we overlooked. Someone who is framing her and stringing us along. But the idea of Ellie being the one doing all of this…” he shakes his head. “I don’t buy it.”
