Nine
BEN
December 11 — 6:20 PM
I could still tasteher when the lock clicked into place.
Her lip gloss. Her breath. The little broken sound she made when I kissed her harder instead of pulling away.
“Remember,” I’d told her, voice ragged, “you can’t tell anyone this happened. If Henry finds out, you’re gone. And Mr. Stonewood…”
I hadn’t finished the sentence. I didn't need to.
She’d promised, hand over her mouth, eyes wide and wrecked and shining like I’d just given her something sacred instead of one more sin to carry.
Now the door to Room Eighteen was shut and locked with her inside, and my arm still felt phantom-warm where she’d grabbed it and begged for one thing that was hers. One kiss, one moment before she sold her life away to a man who might as well be the devil and called it love.
I forced my feet to move.
Down the hallway, away from her door. Past the numbered rooms where the other women were changing into dresses they’d paid obscene amounts of money for, casting themselves as contenders in a game that was never built for them.
Chrissy had passed the first test. She hadn’t flinched on the road when she saw my face, hadn’t flinched in the truck when I reminded her what kind of contract she’d signed.
She also hadn’t flinched in her room when I put my hands on her and kissed her like I’d been dreaming about it since the hardware store.
That alone should’ve been enough to make me call the whole damn Game off, drag her downstairs, into the foyer, rip the mask off this place and tell her the truth.
My name is actually Ben Stonewood, Jacob is my middle name, and I never forgot you. I built all of this around you.
But I wouldn’t do that, at least not yet. I needed to be sure it was really me she wanted, not just forbidden passion with anyone who might be willing and able to provide it.
Instead, I pushed through the discreet hidden door at the end of the guest corridor and stepped into my private wing of the lodge. The air shifted the second it shut behind me.
The West Wing was older, darker, and more honest than the rest of the hunting lodge. Less polished veneer, more original bones. This part of the Old Stonewood Hunting Lodge was where I’d hidden away from the world after I woke up from the coma, where Henry had cleared out the old trophies and bourbon cabinets and built me a command center instead.
Ashgrove House, the house I’d been raised in until the accident, was the family mausoleum now, full of ghosts and furniture and a history I wasn’t ready to face yet. I hadn’t set foot in that place since I woke up in a hospital bed four years ago and realized that my father was dead and buried, my stepmother was potentially responsible for his death and out of the country, and my face wasn’t my own anymore.
So I took the lodge.
The house the Stonewoods had built in the woods, when the old money was newer, and the blood was fresher. Men in my family had come here to hunt for generations upon generations.
I’d just changed the game.
I limped into the West Wing control room, favoring my bad knee, and hit the panel to bring the monitors to full brightness. Camera feeds from the drive, the foyer, the dining room, the hallways. Thermal, night vision, standard.
And on the top right screen? That little gem showed the interior of room eighteen from a discreet 360-degree camera in the room’s overhead light.
Chrissy was still inside, back against the wall where I’d left her, fingers pressed to her mouth like she could hold the kiss there if she just tried hard enough. Her suitcase sat abandoned in the middle of the floor. The wardrobe hung open, dresses in reds, and greens, and blacks, waiting like bait.
She looked stunned, flushed, and alive in a way I hadn’t seen in her these past four years.
Mine.
A slow, traitorous warmth spilled down my spine.
Half of me wanted to scrap all of it — masks, actors, challenges, ceremony — and go upstairs as myself. I could knock on her door, tell her everything, and beg her to put me out of my misery and marry me.
She’d hate me at first. She should. I’d earned every ounce of the fury she’d likely unleash on me when she found out.
