And this. This is the start of my admission. Steeling my spine, I force myself to hold her gaze. “Because I wanted to see what you would do. I needed to know if you could forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what? Something you invented?” The confusion spins out of control and her fingertips dig into my thighs as she holds on for dear life. “This is a really cruel game.”
“It’s not a game.” I crush her tighter against me even when she resists. “I do awful things all the time. I don’t mean to, but I end up hurting everyone. I always have.”
“But you didn’t hurt me.” She punches my shoulder, lightly, then punches it again, hard. “Why let me think you did?”
I shake my head, tongue tied in all the wrong places. But I need to get it out because I can’t live with the secret for one moment longer. “I’m the one who uploaded the video. I’m the reason Tessa is dead.”
My muscles clench as I wait for her to react, to scramble away, to gasp in shock, to scream abuse as she gouges out my eyes. Instead, she frowns. “I know. Caylon told me and I should have worked it out, anyway. It didn’t make sense that Robbie put it online himself.”
I release my hold as my body goes numb. “Caylon told you when?”
Lilac wiggles the phone. “That night.” She turns and straddles me, knees pressing on either side of my thighs. “Why did you?”
“To drive him away. We wanted him gone,Iwanted him gone, and I thought if I put it online, he’d go up north like he was always threatening and get out of our hair.”
She tips her head forward until her curls forms a wall around both our faces. A flimsy shield to hold out the world.
“The plan was to out him as a rapist, then threaten to go to the police if he didn’t move away.”
“So, what happened?”
I laugh, running my hands over her hips and holding them tight. “He threatened to do the same. Tell the police about everything he’d been involved in over the years.”
She gives a small gasp and I’m not sure if it’s at the information or because I can’t resist arching up against her. “And did he?”
“He’d be dead if he had.” A snort explodes from me. “Stefan would have killed him and cleaned the evidence away.” Something very close to what had happened in the end, only by a different route. “But if it had gone down that way, I would’ve been kicked out of the syndicate, too, and it’s the only place where it feels like I belong.”
Her hands clench and unclench, wanting to touch me but waiting for permission. I take them in mine and let her direct me with small nudges to where she wants to go. One hand cupping my head, the other resting against my chest.
“Like family,” she whispers.
My throat grips so hard, it’s painful. Every time I think I’ve reached the end of this girl, this woman, she opens another layer to show we fit together better than I ever could have dreamed. “You feel it too?”
She nods, bending forward and waiting until I press my lips against hers, drinking my fill like a man lost in the desert for so long he thought he’d surely die.
“I tried to take the recording down, but it was useless. Every takedown I issued another ten versions just popped up in its place. Even Caylon couldn’t get rid of the damn thing, and he’s the smartest person I know.” My mouth keeps working, but the words stop coming out of it.
Even after the video spread, it didn’t occur to me that Tessa would see it. That wasn’t why I put it online; the thought never really crossed my mind.
Until the night I circled back to the warehouse to beat him. To make Robbie understand it would keep happening until he made himself disappear.
“Where’s Tessa now?”
“Dead. She killed herself.”
The shock had been so severe that I didn’t understand my finger had pulled the trigger until a moment after Robbie fell.
“I’m so sorry I took her from you. I never intended to hurt her. I just didn’t think.” When she sighs against my cheek, I mutter like an echo of my dad, “I never think.”
Then she shifts on my lap and there’s another reason not to think. The soft bump of her pussy against my crotch makes me hard in an instant. Her lips are close to mine, parted, and I claim them again, safe to lose myself in her because she knows the worst of me, the raw truth of my failures, but she’s still here. Despite that. Because of that. It doesn’t matter.
A thought flickers in the back of my head like a fluorescent lightbulb at the end of its life. What if the video had showed something different? What if I had done to her what she feared?
But it’s extinguished by the gentle thrust of her hips against me. The softness of her lips, swelling under my kisses. The press of her hand against my chest. The weight of her breasts in my hands.
I twist her until she’s laying along the back seat, me atop her. Her hands reach above her head, grasping for a handle, anything to hold on to as I strip the clothes from her body, wrench them off mine.
