“Really?” Zara’s voice was bone-dry. “No idea at all?”
He ignored that because there was a bleakness in her face then, and he couldn’t stand it.
“Does she always speak to you in that manner?” he asked.
There was something he didn’t understand in that hard gleam in her eyes, some truth he couldn’t decode in the way she pressed her lips together, and she didn’t answer him. She stalked deeper into the sitting room instead and didn’t stop moving until she stood at one of the long windows.
“I’ll take it that she does,” he said to the fine line of her too-straight back. He wanted too many things that didn’t make sense. To set her free, now, before he hurt her the way he thought he would. To gather her close and never let her go. To defend her. To help her. To change all of this before it swallowed them both whole. To believe that somehow, it wasn’t already too late. “Zara, I don’t want—”
“I suppose your family is perfect then,” she said, and she sounded much farther away than she was, as if she’d catapulted herself out into all that winter sunshine and hung somewhere over the chilly expanse of Central Park. As if she was already gone. As if he’d already done the thing that would make her leave. His revenge. “No tensions, no arguments. No underlying darkness informing even the most banal of interactions. Just endless years of bliss and harmony. You’re very lucky, Chase. But not everyone can say the same.”
He didn’t know what that was, that terrible thing that shook through him, an earthquake of devastation and determination, and it had too much to do with that bleak note in her voice. And that deep, black hurt where his heart should have died twenty years ago. Until Zara, he’d thought it had.
“I killed my mother.”
Chase didn’t know where that had come from.
For a stunned, breathless moment he thought he hadn’t truly said such a thing, hadn’t thrown it out like that, bald and ugly in the midst of this delicate, pretty room—that it was only inside his head, where it belonged, where it needed to stay locked up in the dark—
But Zara turned, slowly.
He didn’t know what he expected to see on her face. Shock? Horror? Disgust?
She only held his gaze and waited.
And he hadn’t wanted to blurt that out in the first place. He didn’t know why he had. He wanted to turn and leave. To disappear into the cold embrace of this careless city and never return to this place, this subject, this woman with golden eyes who saw too much.
Instead, he moved a step closer.
“We were on holiday in South Africa. We’d been meaning to take a family trip that day, but my father was called away on some business thing or another, so it was only the rest of us.” He bit out the words like they might fight back if he didn’t, staccato and stern. As black as his soul. “Mattie and I were in the back. She was only little, and she kept singing this annoying song over and over. She wouldn’t stop. I was cruel to her, of course, because I was thirteen and I knew there was nothing she hated so much as being called a baby.”
He searched her face, but there was nothing. No reaction, no accusation. Just Zara, waiting. As if there was nothing he could say that was terrible enough to make her look at him any differently than she did then.
And he wanted her to know the truth, suddenly. He wanted her to see exactly who he was, so she’d stop looking at him like that. Like she had at Greenleigh, as if he was someone so much better than he was. Someone washed clean. Someone untainted by the things he’d done.
Someone worthy of her, the way he’d pretended he was for those too-few days.
“There was a man in the road,” he said, his voice scratchy. After all these years, he remembered it so well. In such perfect, damning detail. “I teased Mattie about that stupid song until she hit me. My mother turned around—I remember her laughing—and then I saw the man standing there in our lane at the same time the driver did.”
He shook his head, and Zara shifted, but only to fold her arms over her front in that way she had that made him envision her as the professor she’d told him she wanted to become one day, in the future when this odd little interlude of theirs was nothing but a dim, dark memory for her.
When she was free of this. Of him.
But at least she’d know exactly who it was she’d been shackled to for so short a time. He could give her that gift. It could only help her forget him that much faster.
“There was a loud noise, like the tire going out,” he said, and he realized as he did that he’d never said any of this out loud before. He’d never told this story. He’d never imagined he would want to tell it to anyone. “The driver swerved and didn’t move again. He was shot, though I wouldn’t know that until afterward.”
Until Big Bart had told him the barest facts and instructed him to say nothing. Ever. To pretend it was an accident, for all their sakes.
“Oh, Chase,” Zara breathed.
“When the car finally skidded to a stop, we’d tumbled all around. I ended up on top of Mattie. My mother was bleeding, and that was before they dragged her from the car.” He was seeing more past than present then, but he saw the way her arms moved, her hands rising to cover her mouth, her eyes wide and dark with pain. “She looked right at me. She saw me. She was terrified.” He swallowed, hard. “And then she told the men who held her that they’d killed her children, that her children were dead—and I covered Mattie’s mouth with my hand and I held her down, so she couldn’t see anything. I played dead.” He stared at Zara, he mourned her, and then he said it. He spat it out, the words like poison. “And I did absolutely nothing when those men beat my mother before my eyes. Or when they shot her, too.”
The room felt heavier then. Diseased, just as he was. As he must always have been, to do such a thing.
Zara didn’t say anything for a long moment, and when she finally moved her hands from her mouth, all Chase could see was that too-bright warmth in her eyes. The same as always. Brighter, perhaps. He didn’t understand it.
“How are you here?” she asked, her voice too quiet. “How did you survive?”
He didn’t understand that question, either. “There was a passing lorry. The driver stopped and scared them off.” He scowled at her. “That’s all that you have to say? I did nothing. I was right there and I did nothing.” He laughed, and even he could hear it was an awful, broken sound. “It’s what I do.”
“What should you have done?” she asked. There was no accusation there. No horror. It sounded like a simple question and it tore at him.
“I should have done what anyone would have done!” he raged at her. “I should have helped her!”
“How?”
She asked it so calmly. So easily. Chase felt his heart pound in his chest. Too hard. Too fast. He felt as if something giant and merciless had him fast in its grip and was tightening its hold. He felt suspended over a great abyss he couldn’t even name. And all she did was stare back at him, her golden gaze so warm it made him feel scraped raw.
“Should you have abandoned your sister? What if she’d sat up and seen what was happening? What would those men have done to her?” Her voice was so calm, so cool, and Chase was sure that somehow, despite that, it was hacking him into pieces. He felt paralyzed. He felt inside out. And she only kept going. “Or perhaps you could have run out of that car and had those men beat you and shoot you in front of your mother first. Would that have been better?”
“You don’t understand.” He barely recognized his own voice, and he had no memory of moving, of closing the distance between them, but she was still before the windows and then he was, too. “You weren’t there.”
“No,” she agreed. “But what you’re describing—”
“I killed her as surely as if I shot her myself.”
He didn’t recognize his own voice, only the raw thing that the words left behind where his throat had been.
“Your mother wanted to save you, Chase,” Zara said softly. Carefully, he thought, though her eyes were st
ill so bright. “That’s why she told those men you and Mattie were already dead, don’t you think? Would you really undo her last sacrifice if you could?”
If the walls had started crumbling around them then, Chase wouldn’t have been at all surprised. He was crumbling, collapsing, toppling into ash and dust, and the only thing he was sure of was that she was at the center of it. He wrapped his hands around her shoulders and pulled her closer, feeling outside his skin. Utterly destroyed.
“Don’t you dare,” he seethed at her. More monster in that moment than he’d ever been man. “Don’t you dare forgive me.”
Her lovely face crumpled in on itself, which he felt like a kick to his side, and then she smoothed it out somehow and offered him that smile of hers. That was like a kick to the head.
“Because you can’t forgive yourself?” she asked. She reached up and took his face between her hands, as if he was only a man, after all. A broken, solitary man who couldn’t possibly deserve all that light that beamed at him from her gaze. “Chase, you must know you couldn’t have saved her. You were thirteen. There was only one of you, and someone had to take care of your sister.”
Chase felt torn in two. He shook his head, breathing as hard as if he was running flat out through the streets of Manhattan. As if he was fighting off those ghosts that had haunted him for twenty years with his own fists, the way he’d dreamed he’d done. The way he wished he’d done.
“It doesn’t matter how hard you train or how diligently you punish yourself or how completely you isolate yourself from the world,” she told him, her voice so serious, her eyes so wide, tears he was stunned to understand were for him making gleaming tracks down her cheeks. “You can’t change the fact that you’re not the villain, Chase. You were a victim, too.”
And he channeled all of those things inside of him, all that darkness, all those howling storms, into that dangerous heat that still moved in him—that always moved in him when she was near.
He couldn’t answer her. He didn’t know how. So he kissed her.
And he poured it all out. His anguish. His grief. The long years of hating himself, the separation from his family. All the things he’d called the monster in him. All the ways he’d made himself pay.
He poured it all into her, and she took it.
She took it and she reveled in it. When he went to strip that dress from her perfect body, she helped him. When he picked her up and walked her backward until she was up against the wall, she wrapped her legs around his hips and sank down onto him, sheathing him deep inside of her.
Like she was fluent in any language he might try to speak to her.
He put one hand flat against the wall, kept the other at her bottom to support her, and then he rode them both hard and wild and screaming into oblivion.
And it wasn’t enough.
Nothing will ever be enough, something that felt like truth, like fate, whispered inside of him.
He was like a man possessed. He carried her up to the master bedroom and he took his time, licking his way across every inch of her lovely, flushed skin like that might bring any remaining secrets between them to the surface. Like that might heal them both.
Maybe it would, he thought. Maybe it truly could.
He lavished her with all the love and need and hope he’d carried around for too long, locked away so deep within him even he hadn’t realized it was there.
“You’re not to blame,” Zara told him again and again, until it was like poetry.
He couldn’t say he believed that, but he heard her. And the more she said it, the more those dark things in him yielded before the onslaught of all that glorious light.
Before her.
He ordered food at some point from the butler service that came with the suite and he fed her himself, like she was the queen he’d often imagined her. He took her into the spacious bath and soaked them both, muttering words he knew he’d regret later, but couldn’t seem to stop from simply coming out of him, like she’d opened something up in him he’d never fully close again.
“I love you,” he told her, fierce and foolish, while her tears still fell and mingled with the water all around them, like some kind of baptism he didn’t deserve. “And you’ll regret that, too. Trust me, Zara. You will wish you never met me, and you will curse the day you tried to heal me. The only thing that happens to the people I love is—”
“Chase,” she said, twisting around in the bath and pulling his mouth down to hers. “Shut up.”
He lost himself in her. He found himself in her.
And when he woke the next morning, she was draped over him as if she’d been expertly handcrafted to fit him just so. He brushed a hank of her fiery hair back from her face and almost smiled at the cranky little noise she made before burrowing into his chest, refusing to open her eyes.
He had never felt anything like this—a great wave of something too intense to name that swept over him, through him, into him. Nothing had ever felt like this before, in as long as Chase could remember. Nothing had ever been so right.
But it was New Year’s Eve. Their time was up. Before the clock struck midnight, no matter what happened with the company, he would lose her forever.
He knew he would. It was just as he’d planned from the start.
CHAPTER TEN
“IF YOU’LL COME this way.” The deferential young man who Zara knew was Chase’s assistant politely indicated that she should follow him through the throngs of luxuriously dressed New Year’s revelers, all of whom crowded into the Whitaker Industries ballroom high above Manhattan in their upper-class, expensive splendor. “Mr. Whitaker is gathering the board for a quick word before the ball drops.”
“I’m not on the board,” Zara said—stupidly. This man would know that already.
But she couldn’t seem to help herself or the chill that rolled through her. Her hand clutched too hard around the stem of her wineglass, and she thought for a wild moment that she might snap it off. Then drop the whole mess of it on her own feet. Wouldn’t that be elegant? Ariella—whose malevolence Zara was certain she could scent in the air, like incense—would love it.
Chase’s assistant smiled. “Your presence was specifically requested.”
Zara wanted to bolt. That was her first panicked reaction, and it ran deep, so deep that she shivered slightly and curled her toes hard into the too-high sandals she should have known better than to wear tonight. She wanted to leave this sparkling party, filled to the brim with so many fake smiles to her face and whispers behind her back, and run until everyone forgot, once again, that Ariella Elliott had a younger sister at all, much less that Chase Whitaker had married her.
It was the sandals that decided her. They were made for sauntering about like a woman with great confidence, not running away from the inevitable. She’d be more likely to trip and fall than make it out of this place, and she thought the humiliation of such a thing might actually kill her.
Pull yourself together, she ordered herself sternly.
“Of course,” she said to Chase’s assistant, and smiled coolly. “Lead the way.”
And then she picked up the long, flowing skirt of her dress and followed him. He led her out of the warm, brightly lit ballroom and down one of the gilt-edged, dark-wood-accented hallways that proclaimed the Whitaker wealth and status in unmistakable terms. It was quieter here, away from the crowd and the band and the anticipation of midnight. It made it impossible for Zara to be anything but all too aware that in every way that mattered, she was marching toward her own execution.
Which, funnily enough, made her think of a very similar forced march she’d made almost a month ago now, down the aisle in her hometown church.
At least this time, the damned dress fits, she told herself balefully, running her free hand over her hip and letting the smooth, pretty material soothe her.
It had been a very long day. Elastic and interminable.
Chase had been gone before she woke up, much later in the morning than she was u
sed to waking, after such a torrid night. He’d left her instructions to meet him at his office that evening, and she’d had nothing to do but sit in that hotel suite and stew over…everything. By the time her dress had been delivered in the afternoon, she was in a state even the longest bath imaginable couldn’t soothe. Yet somehow, despite her gnawing certainty that something terrible was about to happen, was already happening, the night had eventually fallen. The hours had finally passed.
And soon enough she’d found herself walking into Chase’s vast, sleek CEO’s domain in the corner of the top floor in the Whitaker Industries offices, and all of that waiting had felt like no more than an instant.
He was so beautiful, she’d thought, as stunned as if she was seeing him for the first time. Men like him were the reason formal wear had been invented, and the tuxedo he’d worn with such nonchalance made him look nothing short of edible, perfectly highlighting his lean, athletic form. His black hair had been a touch too long, his dark blue eyes had still been the color of lost things and winter seas, and she’d known then, what that mouth felt like when he whispered that he loved her, again and again, until her skin felt tattooed with it.
She’d felt marked. Claimed and entirely his—no matter that deep down, she’d known better.
“Have I mentioned that you’re beautiful?” Chase had asked gruffly, his mouth a stern line and only the faintest gleam in that stunning blue gaze of his as he looked down at her. “Particularly tonight.” His gaze had dropped, then heated to a hungry wildfire as he’d taken in what she was wearing. “Particularly in that dress.”
“Well,” she’d said mildly, “it fits.”
It did more than fit. It was a marvel, and Zara had known it the moment she’d finally found it. The dress was a deep burgundy with contrasting red panels at the sides, flowing down from studded cap sleeves to the floor in a gauzy fall of fabric that hinted at her legs beneath. It sported a deep V in front that plunged down between her breasts almost to her navel, before being caught in a belt that cinched in at her waist and showed off her figure in a vaguely Grecian fashion. And that was the dress’s true beauty: when she wore it, even when she’d tried it on in a tiny dressing room all by herself in a boutique on Madison Avenue, Zara felt the way she did when Chase looked at her.
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