Page 92 of Hate Me Like You Mean It

And my mind went black.

30

Dominic

I’d been kicked in the gut exactly one time in my life.

It’d knocked the wind out of me, smeared bruised shadows over my vision, and made me double over with instant crippling nausea. And I could say with full confidence that I would take a thousand cleats to the stomach if it meant never experiencing this feeling again.

I wasn’t breathing.

My burning lungs were threatening to collapse from overuse, my mouth was dry from all the excess air being shoved in and out of it, and my borderline hysteria was echoing off the walls of the fucking altar of worship I’d accidentally built for her, but I was not breathing.

And Robert wasn’t picking up his phone.

Sweat gathered at the back of my neck, the speed of my pulse jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other while I blindly thumbed the redial button, trying to reorient myself after being hit by a freight train.

Nine unread texts, fourteen missed calls, and three unreturned voicemails later, he finally picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hey. It’s me. We need to talk.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Dominic.”

“Which one?”

I wasn’t in the mood. “Can you meet up?”

“You’re a robot, aren’t you? One of those AI voices my grandson was telling me about. I knew I shouldn’t have given my number to Prickly & Pedantic, but who can say no to a 5 percent discount on their sweater vest subscription? In this economy?”

“Robert. Focus.”

“How the hell do you know my name? Who is this?”

Jesus fucking Christ. This was exactly where Alice got it from. Her humor was more polished and biting, but the bloodsucking frustration it inspired was nearly identical. “It’s Dominic Crawford.”

“That’s not possible. Dominic’s dead.”

To him.

The joke was that I was dead to him.

“We need to talk. About Alice.”

“Which one?”

I shut my eyes, inhaled, and counted to three, swallowing around the clump of broken glass stuck in my throat. I could practically hear him smirking with satisfaction.

“Okay, listen. I know you’re pissed, and I’m sorry I’ve been a little hard to reach, but we… It wasn’t Alice, was it? She wasn’t the one who took the picture.”

It couldn’t have been. The time and date reflected on the dashboard of the car overlapped with the time and date on her smartwatch when she’d tucked her hair behind her ear. It was a difference of two minutes, and I’d double-checked the metadataof the video to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. It couldn’t have been her.

He left me hanging for a full minute. Then, finally, “If you are who you say you are, come meet me for afternoon tea at my regular spot. Then we can talk.”

“Pretty sure I’m banned from setting foot anywhere near one of your hotels, courtesy of the current CEO?—”