Page 99 of My Beautiful Sin

I’d been wilder in New York than I had been in California. Working as a cop had calmed the beast that lived inside me somewhat, but once I was in Manhattan, I was alone with no bad guys to chase. I was living in an incredible town, pursuing a life I truly believed I would love. I went home to a small but decent apartment, courtesy of Uncle Peter’s financial planning.

On the surface, I had a good life. But my family was dead.

And, yeah, I thought I wanted to be, too.

“You didn’t,” Devlin says after I make that horrible admission aloud. “You wanted the danger, sure. But you wanted to win. You wanted to tell death to go fuck itself.”

“That’s now,” I say. “Back then…” I trail off with a shrug. “I don’t think so.”

“I do.”

I frown as his hand tightens on my leg as if he’s using the connection as a buffer against an emotion too tense to go unchecked.

“I watched you, remember? You craved the danger. Survivor’s guilt, right? And God knows I knew where that came from,” he says. “But you never completely crossed the line. You never surrendered to the worst that would come. Never truly craved being powerless. You wanted to get close and say fuck you. But you never craved being a victim. That wasn’t what you were about. Getting knifed? Maybe getting raped? Not even close to being on your agenda.”

I swallow. “How can you be so sure?”

“I told you. I know you. And I watched you.”

“Devlin…”

He draws in a loud breath. “That night—in an alley in Manhattan—I watched you fight for your life. I saw the terror in your eyes before you ran and I—”

“What?”

“I killed him, El.”

I wait for the reaction. The protest to rise to my lips. The horror that he’d taken somebody’s life.

But there’s none. Only a hint of relief.

His forehead furrows. “You didn’t know?”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t working at the magazine that week. Meetings at school with our advisors. So I wasn’t reading the news. Just working on school stuff.”

That’s a lie. Or almost a lie. The truth is that I always read the news, no matter how busy I was. But that week I hadn’t. And now I’m certain it’s because I knew what I would have found, and I didn’t want to feel obligated to tell the police anything.

“The guy deserved to be dead,” Devlin says. “And you were fine with his killer walking free.”

“Stop reading my mind.”

His lips twitch. “I’m not. I just know you.”

I make a derisive noise, but I can’t argue. He definitely gets me. He’s the only person who has ever understood me so completely.

“You don’t know everything,” I tell him. “You don’t know why I hooked up with him. Max,” I add. “That was his name.”

“Tell me.”

I draw in a breath, then tell him a truth I haven’t thought about in over five years. “It was because of you.”

His hand tightens on my knee. “Alex, you mean.”

He makes the words a statement, but I shake my head. “No. Devlin Saint. A billionaire philanthropist who’d just burst onto the scene.”

I shift on the couch, tucking my feet under me and taking one of his hands in mine. I stroke his thumb as I talk, my attention on his perfectly manicured thumbnail instead of his face. “I probably wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been in New York for some event with Carrie as your date. But I saw a picture of you two, and so I read the article. Do you remember what you announced while you were in town?”

“Of course. We’d just selected the site for the Foundation.”