I tell myself not to look.
I don’t touch it. I don’t need to. I’m not the kind of woman who snoops. I don’t want to be.
I should be more secure.
But then, there’s a lot of things I should be that I’m not.
I make myself look at the ceiling instead.
Then the screen lights up.
A new message flashes across it, bright as a comet across the night sky.
My eyes catch it before my conscience can jump in front of them.
Good work getting the intel from the clubhouse, Gator. I knew sending you to fuck that bartender would pay off.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Evan
“What the fuck, Gator?”
That voice, in a tone I’ve never heard — enraged, hurt, mourning, murderous — rips through my sleep to pull me into the vicious world of the living. Just in time to feel a sharp crack across my cheek; an open palm, hard enough to snap my limp head sideways and make stars pop behind my eyes.
I blink, disoriented, mouth tasting like sleep and sex and something suddenly sharp and bloody. The room is dim. The flickering light of the one functioning streetlight in the parking lot leaks through the blinds, slicing the bed in pale, blinking stripes. Molly stands over me in one of my shirts, bare legs planted like she’s bracing for impact. Her hair is wild. Her eyes are on fire, with tears leaking out the edges; a river of pain streaming from two beautiful pools of vengeance.
She’s holding my phone.
My stomach drops so fast it feels like I’m falling out of the bed.
“Molly, wait,” I say as I push up on one elbow, shoulder protesting. “I can explain.”
“Explain? Don’t even fucking start.” Her hand shakes around the phone. She’s trying not to fall apart; she’s failing. “Don’t say my name like you didn’t just — like you didn’t just — Fuck, Evan.Fuck. Who thefuckare you?” She swallows hard, and a ragged,wounded sound comes out. “Who the fuck is the man who’s in my bed right now?”
I sit up slowly, palms open. Calm. Controlled. The way you survive around a rabid animal.
“What did you see?” I ask, even though I already know. “Let’s talk about this, OK?”
Her laugh is sharp and ugly. “Oh, I don’t know.” She steps closer and shoves the phone toward my face. “Maybe the part where someone texts you congratulations for ‘getting intel from the clubhouse’ and says sending you in to fuck the bartender ‘paid off.’ Is that all I am to you? A fucking bonus for some dirty fucking job?”
Her voice breaks on the last word, then hardens again like she welded it back together with rage. She throws the phone at me, and it bounces off my chest and lands on the bed.
I reach for the phone, then stop, because touching it feels like admitting every inch of the truth.
“Molly, listen to me. There’s more that you don’t understand.”
“No.” She slaps me, not as hard as I know she can hit — not as hard as the first time — but like she wants to leave a bruise instead of take my head off. “You listen to me. Who the hell are you?”
I draw a breath in through my nose. Release it slow and measured. My pulse is a war drum, but I don’t show any of it on the outside. I’m good at lying, it turns out.
“Evan Wilder,” I say.
“Liar,” she spits it like poison. “Evan is the boy I fell in love with in high school. The boy who was honest and reckless and had the cutest fucking smile and disappeared and left me with a broken heart. You? You’re not Evan. You’re not even fucking real.”
“I am.” The words come out too fast, too desperate, the racing in my heart propelling every syllable. I rein it in, think of June. “I am. I didn’t lie about… about everything.”
Her eyes flash, hands flex; she’s one wrong word from another strike, but one right word from coming back to my side. That’s what love will do to you; it’ll wreck your convictions, make you betray others, turn those who matter into nothing but leverage. “Oh? So what the fuck have you been honest about? Because right now, all I see is a fucking liar wearing a mask of the face of the boy I used to love. A fucking liar whofucked meandused meto get at my family.”
