Page 42 of The Lies Of Omission (Without Limits #3)

THEO

T he marquee glowed like a palace of lies when I stepped back inside, barely stitched together, a man made of splinters and duct tape. When Sinclair left me in that locker room—on my knees, wrecked—he didn’t just walk away. He took my fucking heart with him.

It had been bruised before. Cracked. Weathered. But this time, he left a gaping hollow, a raw, bleeding pit where something living used to be. And now I was expected to return to this glittering circus like nothing had happened.

The tables sparkled with crystal and silver. The flowers were perfect, arranged with surgical precision like they’d been designed to mock me.

The world hadn’t ended. Not for anyone else.

I slid into my seat a shell of a man, surrounded by a sea of polished masks and expensive perfume. Silk dresses shimmered. Dark suits gleamed. People laughed like they weren’t rotting inside.

“How did it go?” Rosalie leaned in, trying to tame the wreck of my hair that Sin had destroyed with his hands and mouth. Her fingers were gentle—comforting—but wrong.

Unable to speak, I just shook my head and clenched my fists, willing the tears back. I had gone after him to tell the truth. About me. About Rosalie. About how we’d spent the last few weeks planning our escape from this life. And the hold they had over us.

But logic disintegrated the moment I was in his orbit. That magnetism—that cursed, electric pull—obliterated every thought. I didn’t talk. I couldn’t even if I’d tried. Every thought evaporated from my mind. Instead, I touched. I tasted. I begged.

It had been so long. And I was weak.

“I fucked up,” I rasped, turning away so no one would see me falling apart. She looked at me, soft with worry.

“Oh, Theo…” she murmured, low and steady while the room buzzed around us, full of chatter and clinking glass.

“I meant to talk to him. I did. But…” My voice broke.

“You needed to touch him more than you needed to speak,” she finished for me.

I nodded, swallowing down the emotion lodged in my throat and sniffed. God, I was pathetic.

She cupped my face, wiping away the tears I couldn’t stop. To an outsider, it would’ve looked romantic—two perfect heirs sharing a private moment.

But we were just two friends holding each other together with spit and string and lies.

“It’ll work out,” she whispered. “It has to.”

I wanted to believe her. I did. But I felt like a cat who had burned through eight and a half lives, each more reckless than the last.

We didn’t notice the shift. The pause in conversation. The staff passed out fresh flutes of champagne. The way my father rose to his feet, silver spoon tapping his glass with a smugness that could crush bone.

I didn’t hear the bomb until it dropped.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” my father’s voice echoed across the room like a war drum. “Thank you for joining us this evening. I’m proud to announce the engagement of my son, Theodore Astor, and the lovely Rosalie Vanderbilt.”

My heart stopped.

Time. Fucking. Froze.

The blood drained from my face. My lungs locked up tight. My reality fractured like glass under pressure. People clapped. Cheered. Applauded the death of me. Cameras flashed as Rosealie and I looked at each other with mirrored expressions of horror.

My watery gaze landed on Sin across the room. He looked like he’d been stabbed in the gut. Skin bone white, he staggered as my father’s words sliced straight through him.

Rosalie gasped, “Oh shit.” Her hand clutching my arm, nails digging in like she was anchoring me to this imploding world.

But my focus was locked on Sin. It was like a car crash happening in slow motion.

You knew what was going to happen, but you couldn’t look away.

The bucket of iced champagne he was holding slipped through his hands.

It hit the ground with a savage crack, champagne exploding across the floor like it was blood.

Shattered glass glittered like diamonds in the wreckage.

The sound reverberated through the silence that encompassed the marquee with deafening clarity.

Dozens of heads turned toward him. The broken boy with tears burning his beautiful skin. The man who owned my heart.

His face—God, his face—was a violent maelstrom of agony, raw emotion splashing across his features until, suddenly, it was gone. Wiped clean in a split second, like it had never existed.

He spun on his heels and ran, leaving a wake of devastation behind him. He ran from me. From the lie. From the truth he’d begged for, but I’d been too weak and broken to tell him.

“Sin!” I shouted, my voice hoarse, pleading, already halfway out of my chair.

He didn’t look back. But his steps faltered. He almost stopped, and my heart skipped a beat in hope, but he didn’t. He ran like the mouth of hell had opened up.

My chair crashed to the floor. A brutal sound in the vacuum left behind. All eyes turned to me. The next spectacle. Their expectation was palpable. Suffocating.

My father’s face twisted into a look of disgust. Fury cloaked in decorum. “Sit. The fuck. Down.” He took a step toward me, his voice low and lethal.

That voice used to freeze me in place. Used to cage me. But not tonight. Not now. Never a-fucking-gain. Something clicked into place inside me. Crystal. Sharp. Final.

I didn’t care about the Astor legacy. The empire. The billions. I didn’t care about any of it. Because he had just run out that door, and he was all that mattered.

“No.” My voice didn’t shake. I straightened my spine and pulled my shoulders back. Looked the monster in the square in the eye.

My father’s eyes narrowed, venomous. “If you don’t do what you’re told, honor your obligations, you’ll lose everything .”

The crowd held their breath. Cameras clicked like machine guns. Vanity Fair and Forbes had front row seats to the Astor downfall. Let them. Let them watch me walk away. Let them write their headlines.

I. Did. Not. Care.

My world was already burning, and I threw gasoline on the fire.

“No,” I said again, louder this time. “I’m not your pawn.”

He scoffed. A king losing his grip on the board. “You are whatever I make you. You ungrateful?—”

“Not anymore!” My voice cracked like thunder. “It took me thirty-five fucking years, but I’m done. I’m done being your tool. Your project. Your disappointment.”

My hands shook, balled into fists, aching to hit something. Rosalie stood beside me—tall, proud, silent in her support. She stared down at her father the way I did mine. We weren’t heirs anymore. We were rebels.

“I’m gay.”

The room gasped. A collective inhale of horror and scandal. Across the crowd, I saw Thalia’s face light up, her smile like a firework in a pitch black sky. A single nod of pride.

“I’ve always been gay.”

My father went rigid, his face flushed with rage and embarrassment. “How dare you—” he began.

But I was ready to walk away. The kingdom could fall. The family name could rot. The vultures could circle all they wanted, picking apart what remained. All that mattered now was Sinclair.

“Sending me away at fifteen didn’t change a damn thing,” I spat, my voice cracking through the glittering silence.

“All it did was teach me how to hate—myself, you, everything I ever believed in. You didn’t make me better.

You made me hollow. You carved out every piece of me that didn’t fit your design and left behind something obedient, broken—something you could mold and manipulate at will. ”

My father’s face contorted, veins pulsed in his forehead, spit flying from his lips as he snarled, “You were never worthy of the Astor name. Of my legacy .”

I didn’t flinch. I smiled. Sharp and cruel and soaked in grief. “I don’t want it,” I hissed. “Keep your fucking legacy. I’d rather be dirt poor with the man I love than live another second crawling through your filth.”

Gasps erupted from the crowd. Champagne glasses slipped through fingers and shattered like the version of me they’d all crafted in their heads. My mother sobbed across the table, wringing her hands on a linen napkin as if she could wipe away the damage.

“Oh, Theodore…” Her voice broke, brittle and raw. “I didn’t know. I never knew that’s where he sent you…” Her tear-streaked face twisted with a sudden fury, and she rounded on my father. “How could you do that to your own child ?!”

He didn’t answer. She’d never spoken to him in that tone before.

I shoved past him before he could regain his composure, pushing through the tables as staff scrambled to hold back the stunned guests and predatory reporters.

Faces blurred. Flashbulbs went off like gunfire, but I continued like I was marching to war.

Because I was. I was preparing for the fight of my life. I’d lay everything out on the battleground, for just one more chance.

Over my shoulder, I saw Rosalie standing like a storm in the center of it all, her eyes wet and shining. She clutched her chest, mouthing silently: “Go. I’ve got this.”

My mother joined her, fury rising behind her like waves about to break. I didn’t stay to see the bloodbath that would follow. I was already sprinting. Through the hedges. Past the rose garden. Over the velvet-soft lawn that felt like it would tear open with every desperate step.

I collapsed halfway down the slope, my legs buckling as tears poured down my face, mouth open in a silent scream. For the first time in my life—I was free. It tasted like salt and smoke and fury. Every breath seared my lungs like they’d never filled with air before.

“Fucking hell, Theo.” Thalia’s voice cut through the night like a flare. She appeared out of nowhere, steady as ever, holding out her hand.

I grabbed it like a lifeline, my chest heaving, my knees scraped and grass-stained.

“I didn’t think you had it in you,” she murmured, pulling me upright.

“Neither did I,” I choked, my throat raw. “But I… I had to. I couldn’t keep being?—”

“You might just be worthy of him after all.” Her words were soft, but they split me open like a scalpel.