I thought about that, and admittedly liked the sound of it. It helped un-sink my stomach, at least a little. “Maybe…”
“Go to him,” William whispered.
I frowned up at him. “What if I ‘go to him’ and he’s balls deep in that woman?”
“That would be an unexpected development.” William rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “I think you would, at that point, tell him you had just come to let him know you caught gonorrhea from him, and he was a dirty bastard.”
I nodded. “That’s actually a good idea.”
“Woah. You have gonorrhea? I meant as a joke.”
I sighed and handed him his goggles back. “Sorry, Hailey. I’ve got to leave you alone with him now. By the way, he’s right about the tuna worms, though, as much as I hate to admit it. I’ve seen the videos. He sent them out to everyone in the office a few months ago.”
Hailey pursed her lips in disappointment. “The last thing William needs is somebody telling him he’s right. What have you done?”
I grinned. “Somehow, I have a feeling you can figure out how to handle him.”
I walked out and the grin melted from my face in seconds. I wanted to believe the good version of the story. He’d been telling me the truth, after all. It was a business meeting. The woman turned out to be a creep. He left. End of story.
I was too emotionally invested to be satisfied, though. A jealous voice in my head kept whispering all the horrible things that could be happening right now—the horrible things that had already happened. If Claire had been telling the truth, this wasn't even the first time he'd gone behind my back. It would've constantly been happening since we first met, and to him, I'd be nothing but a plaything to manipulate and use until he got bored.
On the other hand, I still couldn’t shake the memory of what he’d told me. His step-sister was psychotic. She had claimed she’d ruin things between us, but I couldn’t even begin to figure out how she could’ve been involved in all of this. She would’ve had to put Claire and this woman up to the deception, and while I didn’t know the woman, it seemed like a serious stretch to think someone would go to such lengths.
There was no use agonizing over it, I figured. I wasn’t going to do any more guesswork. I’d do what I should’ve done as soon as Claire told me her story. I was going to find Liam and confront him. I just hoped he would be fully clothed and alone when I caught up with him.
When I got to the street below, I spotted Liam waiting on the curb, trying to hail a cab. I stopped dead in my tracks, deciding I needed to see where he was going for myself instead of trusting that he would tell me the truth. I nearly got knocked to the ground when the man behind me bumped into my back.
“Learn to walk, dickweed!” I barked.
The man turned a surprised eye toward me, but kept walking.
I breathed out my annoyance, and then I hid behind an outcropping in the building while I watched after Liam. He was still trying to hail a cab.
I'd hardly ever used a cab in my life, especially once Uber came about, but I made a snap decision to follow him. Whether I wanted to believe it or not, I had to accept the fact that Claire could have been telling the truth. So far, I hadn't so much as caught a hint of Liam lying to me past his hidden identity, which he had pretty readily confessed to. That meant he either wasn't lying, or he was a good liar. Following him might be my only chance to catch him in the act, even if I did feel guilty about it.
A cab pulled up for me almost immediately, and when I glanced toward Liam, I saw he was getting in one as well.
The cab driver was a woman in her twenties with facial piercings and bright purple hair done up in pigtails. She turned to face me with a surprisingly inviting smile.
“Hey, hey!” She said.
“This is going to sound super cliché, but I need you to follow that cab.” I leaned forward and pointed to Liam’s cab in her rearview mirror.
Her eyes followed my finger and narrowed. I thought she was about to laugh at me or tell me to get out, but instead, she balled her hand into a small fist and nodded her head slowly.
“Hell. Yes. I’ve literally been waiting for someone to ask me to do this since I started this job.”
I sat back and looked a little wearily at her. She looked too excited, and I hoped she understood I wasn’t expecting a Hollywood car chase.
Liam’s cab pulled past, and the woman gunned the gas, cutting off a car and getting directly behind Liam’s cab.
"We should probably not follow directly behind him, just in case," I advised.
“Shit,” she hissed. She yanked the wheel to the left, cutting across incoming traffic to jam her cab crookedly between two parked cars, then swerved back across traffic, cutting off more cars. We were now a few cars behind Liam, and she gave me a triumphant thumbs up while a storm of honking horns rang out behind us.
“That was one way to do it,” I said quietly.
She followed somewhat uneventfully for the rest of the trip, keeping a few cars between us and thankfully avoiding more dramatic driving maneuvers, for the most part.
I stuck my hand out and made sure my back was to Liam. I was only a few dozen yards up the street from him, but it was busy enough that I didn’t think there was a significant chance of being spotted.
16
Liam
I sat in the back of the cab and seethed. The “liaison” had my sister written all over her. I tried calling Lilith for the sixth time since storming out of the restaurant, but got her voicemail again.
I had a sinking feeling that my sister wouldn't go through the trouble of hiring an actress and duping Price into thinking she was legit just for laughs. She had promised to screw things up between Lilith and me, giving me no doubt she would've made sure Lilith saw some angle of the dinner and gotten the wrong idea. I thought back to the way the woman had flashed her cleavage so blatantly and tried so hard to look flirtatious. So hard that you could've spotted it from blocks away.
I wanted to break something just thinking about how I’d walked right into Celia’s plan. But how would she have made sure Lilith could see? Was I just being paranoid?
I tried calling Lilith again and nearly squeezed the life out of my phone when she didn’t answer. I nearly told the driver to turn around and take me back to my apartment because Lilith might be home, but I knew in my gut that she wasn’t. Whatever Celia had arranged, Lilith wouldn’t just be sitting at home, watching TV.
Celia, on the other hand, would be waiting with a gloating smile on her face. She was probably sitting just by the front door so she could see the look on my face as quick as humanly possible. I had to find out what she had told Lilith so I’d know where to start when it came time to unravel the lies. I had an idea, too. It was a messy idea, and it was messy enough that I hadn’t wanted to resort to it yet. I pulled out my phone and decided there was no mess too big now, no line too firm to cross.
I called Celia’s husband and waited for him to pick up.
I got out of the cab and jogged to the front door of Celia’s house. I knocked hard and waited. I wasn’t surprised when the door opened only a couple of seconds later to reveal my sister, who was wearing a ridiculously elaborate white dress with black gemstone jewelry to match her hair.
She looked up at me through lazy, triumphant eyes and smiled. “Brother.”
“Step-brother,” I corrected. “What the fuck did you do?”
“You mean this evening? I had a hair appointment and then I went to the—”
“You know what I’m asking. What. Did. You. Do?”
She blew out a puff of air through her nose, letting some of the evil in her heart touch her features for once. “I did exactly what I said I’d do. I did what I’ll continue to do if you don’t give me what I want.”
“What you want. Refresh my memory on that.”
“You know exactly what I want. If you’re perverted enough to need to hear it out loud, then I’ll be happy to oblige. I want to fuck you. Not because I
love you. Not because I want a relationship with you. I want it because you told me no, and nobody tells me no.”
I pursed my lips and nodded. “What happens when your husband finds out?”
“It doesn’t matter, because he won’t. I’ve been outsmarting you without any trouble this whole time, and you’re considerably more capable than poor Walter. He’ll stay the dark for as long as I want him to.”
I grinned, feeling a surge of triumph. I raised my voice and projected it into the house. “Did you hear enough, Walter, or do you still want more proof?”
I waited for the color to drain from Celia’s face, but she only watched me with that same, self-satisfied smile.
“Walter?” I called.
“Your mistake was calling him too early. You gave me a few minutes to convince him my poor, delicate heart would be broken if he really believed the lies you were telling him.”
She saw the look on my face and laughed. “You don’t really think I let him receive calls without listening in, do you? Anyway, he’s not going to be coming to eavesdrop on our conversation. He’s still lying in bed, and he’s happy. He doesn’t want to believe anything bad about me, you know. He wants me to be his perfect little angel, and he’ll keep turning a blind eye to any hints or whispers that I’m not because he’d rather live in the illusion. So you might as well give up your silly attempts to expose me to him now.”
Both our heads turned when another car pulled up in the driveway. I couldn’t see the driver past the headlights, but when the door opened, there was no mistaking Lilith as she stepped out slowly.
“Oh,” Celia tried to step back in the house and close the door.
On instinct, I took hold of her wrist firmly enough to let her know she wasn’t slipping away. I didn’t know why, but I knew she wanted to bolt at the sight of Lilith, and that was reason enough.
“Lilith,” I said over my shoulder. “Have you ever met my sister?”
Lilith came closer. She was walking slowly and the car behind her was still idling. I saw her eyes darting around, trying to take everything in at once. I could practically hear the hum of her brain piecing everything together.
“Your sister,” she said.
“It’s what he does,” Celia said in a somewhat strange tone. She almost sounded like someone else. Less evil, at the least. “He comes up with insane lies when he gets caught. Don’t believe a word he says.”
17
Lilith
I stared in disbelief as Liam held Claire by the wrist. Every insecure molecule of my brain was trying to convince me to believe her. To believe everything, because what other explanation could there be for a man like Liam being interested in me?
But that was dumb. Idiotic, even. Liam had already given me something he couldn’t take away, even if Claire had told the truth all along about him. He let me believe I was worth caring about. Whether he actually cared or not didn’t matter. I still had that belief tucked away deep in my chest, and it wasn’t the kind of gift he could take back.
Yet I didn’t think he wanted to. I looked at Claire and her desperate eyes, at the way she was still trying to tug free from him. Why would she try to duck inside when she saw me if she was telling the truth? Wouldn’t this moment be a triumph for her? Physical proof that Liam was a jerk and he’d come to see his ex at her doorstep?
“So you were Liam’s sister the whole time,” I said, shaking my head at my own idiocy. I wasn’t sure how I let the woman dupe me so thoroughly, and how I’d almost fallen for the biggest dupe of all. I spied on Liam and let my mind go to the darkest corners of possibility, believing he was possible of so many horrible things. Still, I couldn’t imagine what she thought would happen. I’d watch them walk off together and just cut ties with him? Maybe she thought seeing the “date” would shake my trust in him enough that he’d never have a chance of winning me back.
“Wait, the whole time?” Liam looked between us, then back at her. “How long have you known Lilith? Who does she think you are?”
Claire—no, Celia. I remembered the name from one of the first long conversations I’d had with Liam. Celia jerked her arm free from Liam. I thought she was about to give some sort of evil villain speech, or maybe pull a mask off and say she’d have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and that dog, but instead, she slammed the door on both of us without another word.
The last fleeting image I had was of her in the doorway with a twisted, mean expression on her face—an expression mean enough to match the imposing widow’s peak I had initially thought was so distinctive.
Liam looked down at his hand where he’d been touching her wrist and wiped it on his pants absentmindedly. “If you think she’s nice, wait till you meet my parents.”
I laughed, even though I didn’t feel like laughing, not entirely. “Considering I don’t see Miss Megaboob around, I’m going to assume you weren’t bolting out of your chair back at the restaurant to get some action in a bathroom.” I winced as soon as I finished speaking. I’d just admitted to spying on him, and the grin he wore told me he hadn’t missed the fact.
“Bird watching again?” he asked.
I sighed. “Boob watching, more accurately. Those things were giving off so much heat it was hard to see much else.”
Liam laughed. “It’s okay. Celia has a lifetime of practice at twisting facts around and manipulating people. And I forgive you for spying on me.”
“I didn’t ask to be forgiven. But I appreciate it,” I added with a sigh. I looked toward Celia’s house and scowled. “Also, we’re going to bring that bitch down.”
“When I found out about the cameras, I wanted nothing more than to watch her life come crashing down around her. I still do. I guess the difference now is if I had to choose between you and revenge, I’d choose you.”
“Good thing you don’t have to pick one. Let’s put it this way. If I had a penis, I would have a revenge boner right now.”
Liam choked out a laugh. “I’m… pretty sure I’ve never heard of that before.”
“It’s when you get a boner because—”
He held up a hand, his grin widening. “The phrase is self-explanatory. I just meant I don’t know if penises work that way.”
“Mine would,” I said quietly, never taking my eyes from Celia’s house. “It would be throbbing right now and pointed straight toward that evil, cold bitch.”
“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be aroused by that, but I’m sorry, I’m not.”
I shifted my eyes to him. “This isn’t about arousal, Liam. It’s about revenge.”
“You know, I came here ready to tear her house down with my bare hands if I had to, and now you’re making me feel like the rational one.”
“I never told you what happened to the kids who bullied me in school.”
“You never told me you were bullied.”
"Yeah, well, I was. It was how I met my best friend, Emily. She stepped in and defended me, which meant all kinds of grief between her snooty friends. But I got every single one of them back. All the girls who picked on me. Every last one of them paid."
Liam looked at me very seriously, his face lit by the still-idling cab a dozen yards away in Celia’s driveway. “Did you… hurt them?”
“Physically, no. Emotionally, yes. I replaced one girl’s moisturizer with mayonnaise and watched as she slathered her legs and hands in mayo during first-period English. I convinced another one she was pen pals with Aaron Carter—he was big at the time—and that he was in love with her, and once she professed her own love, he stopped writing. I paid for a wake-up call service on the last bully at random times during the school day every day until she eventually got her phone confiscated. That was all phase one, and I had two more phases planned if they didn’t leave me alone afterwards, but I never had to take it that far. With your step-sister, I think we need to jump straight to phase three.”
He looked seriously concerned by now. “Phase three isn’t murder, is it?”
“Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
“I don’t have a concrete plan yet for what we’re going to do, but it’s going to teach her to fuck off, once and for all. I know that much.”
Liam and I took my cab back into the city and stopped at a late-night cafe. He ordered us some frozen yogurt and coffee. His was some kind of cookie dough and brownie monstrosity, while mine was a more sensible chocolate and oreo concoction.
For all my talk of revenge boners, it felt amazing just to sit and eat dessert with him. Nearly losing him made me appreciate him even more than I already had, and I could already feel a little bit of what he meant about the thirst for revenge being hard to focus on. Then again, I still wasn’t going to let that bitch get away with what she did.
“I never understood people who eat cookie dough,” I said as I swallowed a mouthful of my treat.
He furrowed his eyebrows. “What do you mean? It’s a pretty common thing. It tastes amazing.”
“Name me any other food where people purposefully order it before it’s finished being cooked.”
“It’s different.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s raw egg in cookie dough. You’re probably going to spend all night on the toilet after that, assuming you don’t drop dead before then.”
“I’m pretty sure the business wouldn’t survive with a topping that was poisoning or killing people on their menu. Besides, my digestive system is impenetrable. I could eat three hamburgers and fries for breakfast without so much as a cramp. I think I’ll survive.”
“Next you’re going to tell me your poop is solid gold and it doesn’t smell.”
“Wait, that’s not normal?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Just eat your poison and let me think about how I’m going to get revenge on your sister.”
He was quiet for a while, and when he finally spoke, there was a more serious note in his voice. “I feel like I’m supposed to apologize for all of this, but I’m also worried if I apologize, it’s going to seem like I did something to make this all happen.”
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