The Lie That Traps (Lies and Truths Book 1)

23. Izabella

IZABELLA

When there’s a knock at the door of my hotel room, I jump up to answer it, hoping it’s the room service I ordered. Throwing open the door, I’m beyond shocked to find Gulliver looming intimidatingly in the corridor, with Kip, Davis, and Hawthorn all lurking behind him.

“What the fuck?” Gulliver growls.

The sound of his voice sends tremors running through my body, and I move to shut the door, only to find his foot jammed in the way. Instead of leaving, he gently pushes me aside, and all four of the huge boys force their way into my room.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, remembering that I’m only in a sports bra and should really have put some clothes on before I answered the door.

“What the fuck happened to your face?” Gulliver demands, stalking toward me.

Flinching, I duck out of his way, crossing to the other side of the bed and putting the furniture between us as I grab a T-shirt and pull it on, covering up.

“Who did that to you?” Kip asks softly, not approaching me.

“I’m fine,” I say on autopilot, lifting my hands to pull down my hair and hide the worst of the bruising.

“No. Leave it,” Gulliver snaps, slowly approaching me like I’m a wild animal that’s going to bolt or attack him when he gets too close.

“Why are you here? I’d like you to leave, please,” I say, willing my voice to sound normal and calm.

“You didn’t come to school. You haven’t been answering my calls,” Gulliver says, his face a pained mask as he takes another step closer to me.

“I’m sick, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” I reply, quickly darting a glance at the other guys and noticing that they all have similar expressions.

“Penelope said you had an argument with your parents and left. She said she didn’t know where you were. Did she know about this…” Gulliver asks, but his voice cracks as he lifts his hand and gestures to my face, still edging closer to me.

“She knew,” I mutter, feeling the now familiar numbness settle over me again the way it has anytime I’ve thought about what happened on Saturday. “I moved out.” I’ve been at the hotel for two days now, but saying those words out loud to him is the first time it’s actually dawned on me that I left my parents’ home, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back.

I glance away, and when I look up, Gulliver is right in front of me, his brow furrowed, his lips pressed together as he watches me with sad eyes.

“Was this your dad or your mom? Or Penelope?” he asks, his voice barely above a whisper.

Swallowing thickly, I consider just staying quiet. I know I shouldn’t tell him the truth. Mark, Mrs. Humphries, and the doctor who treated me already know, and that’s three people too many, but the words fall from my lips anyway. “Mom and Dad.”

“Baby, I’m so fucking sorry,” he gasps as he finally closes the distance between us and carefully pulls me into his chest, his arms wrapping around me like I’m the most fragile thing in the world.

I let him hold me as numbness consumes me until I can’t even feel him touching me. It’s an odd sensation, but strangely comforting. He’s speaking to me, but I don’t hear what he’s saying through the haze of pressure that’s building inside my head and blocking out the sympathy I can see rolling off him in waves.

His actions were the catalyst for everything that’s happened. He didn’t make them act violently, but this fake engagement was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was a step too far that finally made my parents crack.

“Please stop touching me,” I say, pushing at his chest.

Immediately releasing me, he steps back, his eyes raking over me, presumably looking for more injuries.

“I’m fine. I just don’t want you to touch me,” I say, looking up into his tortured face.

“You’re not fine. Fucking look at you. This is…this is my fault, isn’t it?” he asks.

“You weren’t the one who backhanded me, but all your bullshit lies contributed to my parents losing their shit, yes,” I say frankly, not prepared to sugarcoat this to make him feel better. I may have to blend into the background of my own life, but that doesn’t mean I’m a doormat.

“Fuck,” he growls, lifting his hands to his head and gripping his hair so tightly his fingers go white.

A part of me thinks that maybe I should comfort him or do something to assuage his guilt, but I don’t move because I want him to feel guilty. I need someone to share this burden for at least a little while, and although I’m sure it’s not the healthiest thing to do, watching him suffer lightens my own pain.

“I’m sorry. I’ll tell them the truth, I’ll explain,” he says, his words coming so fast they’re a jumble.

“No,” I cry, silencing him.

“What?” he gasps, his eyes meeting mine.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. You used me to piss off my family and force them to accept that you don’t intend on marrying my sister. It’s too late to take it back. Now I need to use you too. I need to keep up appearances until graduation, then I’ll be leaving, and I’ll never have to see any of you ever again,” I tell him, my voice hard and weirdly monotone.

“You need to go to the police,” Kip says, reminding me that the others are still in the room.

“I’m not going to the police, don’t be ridiculous.”

“But they attacked you,” he says, stepping forward.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not going back to that house, ever.”

“So you’re just going to let them get away with doing this to you?” Gulliver snarls.

I smile, and it feels foreign on my lips, the hint of pain only sharpening my intent. “No, I’m not letting them get away with anything. My parents are driven by money, obsessed with Penelope’s inheritance and the power that will come with being that rich.”

“So what, we’re all rich,” Thorn says, his gaze assessing as he watches me from the other side of the small room.

“Exactly. We’re all rich. I have enough money in my trust fund to never have to work a single day in my life and still live in the lap of luxury. Money isn’t a consideration for any of us, but yet my family is still obsessed with being the richest of the rich. You guys know about the ridiculous set of stipulations in my great-grandfather’s will, right?” I ask, addressing them all.

“She has to be a virgin, marry into another old money family, blah, blah, blah,” Davis says, rolling his eyes.

“Yes, exactly. But beyond that, she also has to maintain a 4.0 GPA, which without me she can’t do,” I say calmly.

“What do you mean?” Kip asks.

“My sister is smart, but she’s not a perfect 4.0 smart.”

“Okay?” Thorn says slowly, looking like he has no idea what I’m talking about.

“I take more than half of my sister’s classes for her,” I blurt.

“What?” Davis cries. “How?”

“You pretend to be her,” Gulliver says, his voice low and rough.

I nod slowly as I watch him piece it all together.

“That’s why no one knows you at school. It’s not because you’re introverted or antisocial or any of that other bullshit your family tried to feed me. It’s because if no one had any clue you existed, you could swap with your sister whenever she needed you to take her place.”

Crawling onto the bed, I sit cross-legged in the middle of the comforter. “The teachers know both of us attend, but my parents make enough donations to the school that no one questions why I skip so many of my own classes and hand in my assignments late, or why my parents insist I do detention on my own in isolation.”

“But why did you agree to do it in the first place? Why would you do that for her?” Kip asks, looking genuinely perplexed.

“My sister might be a massive bitch now, but she hasn’t always been this bad. From the moment my great-grandfather’s inheritance was dropped on her, she’s been living with a noose around her neck, tightening and tightening the older she gets. I remember hearing her crying in her room one day, and when I asked her why she was upset, she said that Mom and Dad would hate her because she was going to fail her chemistry test and ruin all of our lives. We were fourteen, and she thought failing one test was going to destroy our entire family’s future. So I suggested I take the test for her.”

“Wait,” Gulliver interrupts. “You agreed to pretend you don’t exist so your sister can graduate high school,” he snaps, his expression disbelieving.

A wry scoff falls from my lips. “No, I offered to take one test to help her. But when my mom found out about it, she asked me to step in the next time Penelope was struggling, then again and again. After a while, she stopped asking me to help and started demanding. Every time I argued, she’d insist that Penelope was the one with the important future and that this was my role to play.” Looking up, I find all of the guys watching me. “The more they focused on my sister, the more they ignored me, and then one day I realized that I’d traded my own identity to be my sister’s stand-in. You’d be amazed how quickly people forget about you when you simply stop being mentioned.”

“Izabella, that’s crazy,” Kip says, pity pouring out of him in waves.

“I’m not looking for sympathy,” I snap. “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me.” Turning to look at my fake fiancé, I pull back my shoulders and exhale. “Gulliver, you blackmailed me, and this happened,” I say, shamelessly pointing to my bruised face. “You owe me.”

“I’m…fuck. Yeah, of course whatever you need,” he coalesces far too easily.

“I want to do everything I can to ruin my parents’ fucking lives, and the best way to do that is to try and make sure they don’t get the money and power they so desperately want. Penelope helped me on Saturday night, but this money—the expectation and pressure the will is putting on her—it’s poisoning her. So, I’m going to try and ruin her and help her at the same time.”