I snatch up my purse and scrap anything to do with this bar or my revenge or anything else tonight. There is nobody else that will satisfy the demon inside of me now. Not after seeing Alexander and having him slip through my fingers.
I ride the elevator up to my floor and the room where I stashed my bag. I slip the key into the door and step inside, but then I stop.
Something doesn’t feel right.
The curtain is closed, the way that I left it, but the light isn’t on the way that I left it. My instincts are speaking to me again, and this time, I listen.
Or at least I try to.
I pivot on my heel and reach for my knife, but when I turn for the door, there’s a flash of movement beside me. Something reaches out and tangles in my hair and slams my head into the wall. Once is all it takes for me to drop the knife.
Twice, and I’m out cold.
When I wake up, I’m slumped in a chair. Legs dangling off the edge, heels haphazardly kicked off on the floor beneath me.
My head throbs, and there’s something dry and crusty on my skin. Blood, I imagine, but I’m alive so it can’t be too bad. Still, every part of me feels like I’ve been punched with a brick and I’m nauseous, but my clothes are intact.
When I slide a hand down my thigh, the knife that is always there isn’t this time.
“Sorry,babe.” Alexander draws out the word in the way that only a douchebag can. “Had to take your toy away from you. At least for a little while.”
His face explodes into my vision when he sits on the bed across from me. He’s too close and I can still smell him- that Armani cologne- and I really think I’m going to be sick.
My eyes bounce around the room and I try to find comfort in the familiar surroundings.
In this hotel room, I’ve always been in control.
I need that control. I crave it.
But right now, I don’t have it.
Alexander smiles at me and tips the tumbler of scotch in his hand as a toast to the reunion. It’s crystal, and it’s fucking ridiculous because I know that glass didn’t come with the room and I wonder what other props he brought with him tonight.
He always was a try-hard.
“Let me start by properly introducing myself,” he tells me. “I’m known by Royce now. Royce Carrington. And I’m an agent for the federal bureau of investigation.”
He flashes a badge at me, which doesn’t mean shit to my blurry eyes, and waits for me to say something. He wants me to be impressed. Nervous. Intimidated.
I am nothing because he hit my head so goddamned hard I can’t think straight. Spots fill my vision when I close my eyes and take a breath, and Royce sighs.
“Nothing to say, Scarlett? Really? After all this time?”
I blink at him and squint as my eyes narrow in on his face. He looks more like him now. In this room and in this moment. That boy that I once knew, so desperate for approval from those around him.
He can flash his badge around and proclaim himself a different man with a different name, but he’s still that freshman boy. He’s still Alexander Carrington.
It was set in stone before I ever had a chance to know him. Our parents decided our fates long before we could, shoving us together. My mother told me were destined to marry. And I was fourteen, and I didn’t know what my favorite kind of ice cream was, let alone what I wanted in a future husband.
I wasn’t on board with it and I told her I’d never be on board with it.
But like all things concerning my mother, I came around, eventually. Alexander put in the work. He did everything right. He escorted me at cotillion. He carried my books and said everything that I wanted to hear. He spoon-fed me bullshit, and I ate it up like the stupid girl I was.
Until that night. Until the night it all went horribly awry.
“I see the questions in your eyes,” he says. “I’ll save you the trouble, Ten. It’s me. Your eyes are not deceiving you. However, I have to tell you, I thought mine definitely were the first time I saw a photo of you. I couldn’t believe it. Not until I saw you in the flesh. But it really is you. You’re really alive.”
The smile on his face is not full of fond memories. It’s twisted and dark and a carbon copy of the same smile he wore that night. When he and four of his society brothers altered my life irrevocably. I wanted to believe it was the drugs. Or the alcohol.
