With Spite (Don’t Date Him #8)

Prologue

I told you two minutes ago, I do not control the remember.

—Hux’s secret thoughts

Huxley

Five Years Ago

“And what do you want the world to know?” the reporter asked the woman on the screen.

“I just want the world to know that my brother is innocent.” The woman looked heartbroken. “My mother and that stupid police chief had their hands in this. He was set up. My brother is a good man. I…”

I didn’t know her at all, yet that didn’t change the fact that the pleading in her words ripped my heart in two.

I found myself staring at her face and not listening to her words.

Pale-green eyes the color of jade, so expressive and fierce for a brother that was wronged in such a horrible way. And you couldn’t fake that kind of belief in a person. No one protected someone that did something horrible like that unless they truly believed that they were innocent.

Her hair blew away from her face, like whiskey fire. Auburn with strands of red and deep brown.

The wind also blew the light sweater she was wearing in the middle of a heatwave backward, causing her belly to become exposed.

Her skin was so pale.

“Brother.”

I looked up from the television, finding myself staring at my battle buddy.

“What?” I asked, sitting up.

I should be sleeping.

I had to be up at oh-four hundred for a watch, yet I couldn’t stop staring at the woman on the screen.

Some invisible pull had me latching on and not wanting to let go.

“You want to take my watch, and I’ll take yours?” he asked. “I’m feeling sick to my stomach.”

I shoved my feet into my boots and laced them up quickly, so used to the act that I missed no hooks as I tied the laces into a double knot.

“Sure,” I said.

He thanked me, and I left the tent, my phone still in my hand.

I gave one last glance at the woman on the screen, the pleading in her eyes so desperate that my heart skipped a beat.

I didn’t know her. But somehow, some way, I knew that I would see her in real life.