CHAPTER 76 ROHAN
ROHAN
M ore than an hour after the spotlight had shined the word LIE into the sky, Rohan arrived at the boathouse to find that someone else had beaten him there.
“Think we’re the first?” Savannah asked, her back to him.
It had taken Rohan far too long to figure out this clue. “ We ?” he said.
Savannah turned around. Lightning flashed over the mainland. Thunder came after a few seconds’ delay, and Savannah seemed to take that as her cue. She walked toward him, the dim lighting of the boathouse doing nothing to disguise the set of her jaw, the tension between her upper and lower lips.
She stopped all of a foot away from Rohan. “I never gave you permission to be the one who ended things,” she said, a queen to the last.
Rohan let the words slide over him, proverbial water off the duck’s back—or a particularly wily fox’s. He was on the verge of disregarding her altogether, as much as anyone could disregard Savannah Grayson, when she spoke again.
“You were listening when Brady made me that offer, weren’t you?” Savannah was far too insightful for her own good. “I don’t know how you could have been, but logic dictates that you were.”
“Does it?” Rohan might have felt some level of admiration at her conclusion, if he’d been in the state to feel anything at all. “I suppose logic likes dictating things—as do you, Ms. Grayson.”
“I do not care for being manipulated, Rohan. Not by you. Not by Brady Daniels or his sponsor. Not by Hawthornes. Not by Eve.” This was a Savannah Grayson who’d had her fill—a dangerous Savannah Grayson indeed.
She held something up between her middle and index fingers. The photographs.
Rohan watched as Savannah walked slowly to the end of the largest dock slip, staring out at the storm, seemingly impervious to the water blowing in off the ocean.
She lifted the hand that held the photographs of Calla Thorp and those damning invisible messages from Brady’s sponsor, and then her fingers parted.
“Take them,” she told Rohan, as the photographs dropped to the dock.
“If you want them. They’ll improve your case against Brady. ”
The wind caught the edge of the pictures, and Rohan moved in a flash to catch them just in time.
“What game are you playing, Savvy?” Rohan had not meant to use the nickname, but there it was.
“All of them.” Lightning flashed behind Savannah. “You thought I was going to take Brady’s offer.” Her voice was measured. “Given that, the most strategic move on your part would have been to bide your time and wait, to pull your enemy closer than any friend. But you didn’t.”
She was right. That was exactly what he should have done. What he would have done had it been even the slightest bit bearable to do so.
Savannah walked past him toward the shore and then turned back around, trapping him at the end of the dock.
“I see you, Rohan.” She smiled—a glittering, knife’s-edge kind of smile.
“Do you remember the lengths you went to, at the start of this game, to make me feel seen?” She tilted her head to the side, her eyes locked on to his.
“Do you remember me telling you to save the wolfish smile and the quips and the charm and all the rest?”
He did.
“I am not a person you can manipulate.” Savannah placed herself firmly in his way, though she had to be aware that was never a safe place to be. “And you do not get to decide,” she continued, “whether or not I betray you.”
All the cards were on the table now.
“All you get to decide,” Savannah Grayson said, “is whether you are really that scared .” That word was a fighting word. “Of me.”
Rohan had never been able to resist parrying with her. “Hate to break it you, love, but I’m not capable of feeling much of anything at the moment.” He meant that. He knew it to be true, knew that in his current state, there were no lines he would not cross.
And yet… he’d called her love .
“Oh really?” Savannah challenged, and then she walked toward him and past him, all the way to the end of the dock this time.
And then, she stepped off into the water.