Fuck.
“Edwina—”
“No.” She shook her head once. “You wanted answers. Let me finish.”
It took effort to keep myself in the chair.
Her gaze dropped to the glass in her hands, though I knew she was looking somewhere far behind the wine. “She told me you hated me.”
The words hit hard enough to steal the air from my lungs.
“She said what happened between us only happened because you were bored. That men like you always needed something to pass the time with before going back to the life waiting for them.” Her mouth tightened, yet she kept going. “Then she showed me a photo.”
Every muscle in my body locked. “What photo?”
For a moment, she did not answer. When she finally did, her voice was quiet enough to make it worse. “You and me. Kissing. In the rain.”
The room went out of focus around me.
I remembered it instantly. The rain, her mouth, the way wanting her had torn through every excuse I had tried to hold between us. And as soon as I wondered how the fuck Alessia had gotten that photo, the answer came with it. Money could buy eyes.
I dragged a hand over my mouth, my voice coming out too quiet. “She blackmailed you with it.”
Edwina lifted her eyes to mine. “Yes. She said if I didn’t leave quietly, that photo wouldn’t be the only one people saw. She said she could ruin you if she wanted to, and if that happened, it would be my fault for being selfish enough to stay.” Her mouth twisted faintly. “The worst part was that I was already leaving after your betrayal, Hayden. After what I saw at the café, I had no desire to stay and fight for a place beside you when I believedyou had chosen her. Alessia didn’t make me want to leave. She only made it feel urgent, as if staying one more minute would cost me whatever dignity I had left.”
Everything in me went cold.
Edwina looked down at her glass again. “She said I was a distraction. A toy. Someone you picked up when it suited you and put away when it didn’t. She said I had made myself convenient to hide, willing to be touched in secret, foolish enough to confuse desire with love.”
My hands curled into fists against my knees.
Then her voice dropped. “She called me your fucktoy. Your plaything.”
Red moved across my vision so fast I had to grip the glass harder to keep myself in the room.I had heard uglier language and used worse myself, yet hearing those words attached to Edwina, knowing Alessia had thrown them in her face while she stood alone in her own home, made violence stop feeling like rage and start feeling reasonable.
I looked at her and saw the woman sitting in front of me, along with the girl she had been then, trapped in her own home while another woman turned my failures into a weapon. Alessia had found every wound I had left exposed and pressed until Edwina bled from places I had no right to ask forgiveness for. My silence had helped make that possible. Cowardice had helped too. So had the life I had let stand between us until it became useful to someone cruel.
Under the rage, guilt opened in me with nowhere clean to go. This was the kind of guilt that arrived late, settled deep, and made a home out of everything you should have done differently.
“She came into your apartment,” I said, and my voice barely sounded like mine.“She showed you a photo of us.”
“Yes.”
“And then she called you that.”
She nodded again.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped so tightly my knuckles hurt. I stared at the floor because if I looked at her too directly, I did not trust what my face would do.
“I’m going to kill her,” I said.
I looked up at her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes searched mine, and whatever she found there made her set her glass down.
“I didn’t tell you because by then it didn’t matter,” she said. “As I said, I was already leaving. Alessia didn’t create that decision. She only pushed me out the door faster.”
I got up because I could not stay sitting.
