Page 106 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You

“Why?” I manage, barely above a whisper.

He tilts his head slightly, the ghost of that smirk still there. “You know why.”

But I don’t. Not really. I just don’t say it out loud.

He’s told me often enough that he despises me, this shouldn’t come as a shock.

He promised revenge, after all.

Yet it does.

Because his hands never felt like hate. Nor his mouth. Nor the way he touched me. None of it felt like a lie. It felt consuming, unguarded… painfully real.

Except it wasn’t.

My gaze flicks between him and Zara, the pressure in my chest tightening until it’s hard to draw breath.

But I’ll be damned before I let either of them see me break.

My head throbs, the pain matching the pulse of my heart. I feel sick, whether from what I’m seeing or from the ache itself, I can’t tell.

When I look back at him, he’s watching me closely. There’s something almost like concern burning there, though I might be imagining it.

“You remember when you told me not to worry about her, or any other woman?”

“Yes,” he says, that cruel smirk curving his mouth again. “I lied.”

My heart.

Boom, boom.

Shatters.

Splintered beyond repair.

If he’d put a bullet through me, it would have hurt less than this.

This betrayal, if that’s even what it is.

Can it truly be betrayal when he never promised me a damn thing?

Yet after everything we’ve shared, the hate, the pull beneath it, his touch when he forgot to be cruel, the nights in the mountains, the confessions about his mother, I thought there was more.

I saw him pulling away again, yes, but I told myself it was fear.

Not this. Whatever this is.

I suppose I am, after all, painfully naive.

Naive enough to think that hate could soften.

Naive enough to believe that love could bloom in the wreckage.

Naive enough to think that a man like Arlo Vass could ever choose me, and mean it.

My vision blurs. I place a hand against the wall to steady myself, to keep from collapsing.

I won’t cry.