Chapter Twenty-Nine
MILA
Icouldn’t keep my mind on the game. Luke and the other guys blurred across the ice while my thoughts tunneled back to what Mom told me before I left the house.
She had been waiting for me when I got home. Unusual for her to be around that early, even stranger the way she sat—purse perched on her lap, hair still twisted tight, as if she’d barely paused. There had been a gleam in her eye. Not pride. Not exactly triumph. Banked intensity.
“I went digging.” Her lips curved at the corners. “You asked me to look into Dunn. I did.”
I didn’t breathe.
“They’re buying up King Enterprises stock and real estate—quiet moves through companies. The trail’s clean if you don’t know where to look. I do.”
I stared at her. “Why?”
Her mouth curled—not quite a smile. “Because you asked.”
I could barely find my voice. “Will you get caught?”
She shook her head no then glanced at her phone before standing. “I took a late lunch to tell you. I’ve got to head back to the office. Now you know. And, Mila,”—she waited until our gazes locked—“be careful with this information. These are heavy hitters. They don’t play fair or nicely.”
And just that quickly, she was gone again. Back to her job. Back to Dunn. The principal. Back to pretending.
But I wasn’t pretending. Not anymore.
So here I was at the rink, because Avery had dragged me out that evening.
Throughout the game, I couldn’t follow anything.
They’d scored? I went along and pretended to know what was going on by mimicking Avery.
I needed more than a moment to weigh whether to tell Luke what I’d learned or keep it buried.
Because it meant something huge for his family business, his legacy.
The information gnawed at me. After the final buzzer, we gathered by the exit, and I’d made my decision. Avery and I waited by her blue Mercedes. Her two friends—Jasmine and Margie—floated nearby, flirting with two guys from our school.
Chase clocked them and barked, “Aves!” He bounded over, the rest trailing.
Avery lurched toward him, throwing her arms around her brother in a congratulatory hug. As she pulled away, Jax leaned in just enough to murmur something that made her roll her eyes, but she didn’t move away. Her smile tugged at the corner, as though she refused to give him the satisfaction.
I stood back, unsure. I mumbled something vague—“Great game, congrats”—then edged away as Jasmine and Margie joined her. Luke’s hooded gaze followed with banked intensity, as if he was trying to read me.
I leaned into the small gap between me and the trunk, edging away from everyone else as much as I could without notice.
“Luke…” I kept my voice low. The last thing I wanted was to light a match that could ignite into wildfire—especially when his family might still have a chance to quietly control the fallout.
He shifted my way, closing the space between us, that damn muscle ticking in his jaw.
“I found out about something that you need to know.”
He didn’t speak, just waited for me to continue.
“My mom... she told me Dunn Industries is buying King Enterprises stock and properties through shell companies.”
Luke’s jaw shifted. His eyes darkened. There was something unreadable building behind them. A warning. Or maybe accusation. It hit like a door shutting quietly in my face.
He exhaled slow enough I felt it move between us.
“My mom works for Dunn,” I added for full disclosure.
He didn’t respond.
“I wanted to tell you, give you fair warning about what I’d learned.
This time is different.” My voice barely carried, the weight of it settling like a brick wall between us.
He knew what I’d meant—I wasn’t running.
I was standing my ground, fighting alongside him.
It wasn’t like before, even though he had no idea why I’d had to leave in the first place.
I was choosing to let him in. To trust him with what I knew. To fight instead of run.
“Your mom works for Dunn.”
I blinked. “Yeah, I told you—”
“It makes your intel suspect.” His voice was cold, hard, flat. “You don’t think Dunn would feed her misinformation? Use you as a pawn?”
The chill emanating from him cracked something in me. “That’s where we’re at?” My breath caught, betrayal slicing through me. “You think I’m being used? Or you think I’m working against you.” That last one wasn’t a question. The wall that fell over him told me my answer.
Luke’s jaw flexed, eyes fixed somewhere past me, as if I wasn’t even worth the direct hit.
“You think I can ignore what my brother told me? What my family’s already laid out?
Your mom stole from us. Now she works for Dunn.
You walk back into my life like nothing’s changed, and I’m supposed to forget where your loyalty lies? ”
My stomach dropped. “You think I would sell you out? After everything?”
His gaze finally cut to mine, flint and fury. “I think you don’t even have to try. All Dunn has to do is pull strings, and your family dances. You can claim you don’t know, you can say you’re not part of it—but you carry their shadow. And I can’t let that near me again.”
The words hit harder than his silence ever could have. It wasn’t just distrust—it was exile. And it burned like betrayal.
“You wouldn’t trust anything that I tell you, would you?”
“I trust patterns,” he said.
I let out a hollow laugh that scraped my throat raw. “Patterns. That’s all I am to you now? A tally of every way I’ve already let you down? You don’t even see me—you see what you’re afraid of. And you’ve already decided I’m guilty.”
His expression didn’t change. “Right. Because a girl who fucked me over in the past knows how this ends.”
His rejection hit with the force of a riptide.
My throat burned, my head spun, lungs clawing for air.
“That kiss…” I shook my head, barely breathing.
“Guess it didn’t mean a damn thing to you.
” Because to me? It meant everything. Which only proved how stupid I’d been to let him anywhere near my heart again.
He stepped back, eyes hard. “Maybe it meant we were both stupid. Just for different reasons.”
He turned—no hesitation, no apology—and walked straight into the crowd, as if I hadn’t just handed him a piece of me I never should have given him. Like it was easy. As if I was disposable. Forgettable.
I replayed his words on a loop, each one slicing deeper. “All Dunn has to do is pull strings, and your family dances.”
He didn’t see me—he saw them. My mom’s paycheck. Her boss’s shadow. Every choice I made tangled in someone else’s agenda, as though even my breath belonged to Dunn’s plan.
It wasn’t just that he didn’t trust me. It was worse. He trusted Drew more. He trusted his family’s rules more. He trusted what had already happened more than me.
And that? That was betrayal. Because whatever else I’d done, I would never choose Dunn over him. Why would I? Because my mom worked for them? Because we needed the money and that was her only option? But Luke—he had just chosen the Kings over me.
My chest ached, splintered clean through. I wanted to scream, to hit something, to kiss him until he remembered—but all I could do was swallow it down and keep standing. Because breaking in front of him would’ve been the same as proving him right.
Avery approached from the side. “You good?”
I nodded once, stiffly. “Fine. Just ready to go.”
She didn’t press, just shot a glare at Luke’s retreating form before sliding into the driver’s seat. I followed, hands trembling as I opened the passenger door. Her friends climbed into the back, thankfully too caught up in their own chatter to notice my world had just come undone.
As Avery pulled away, I couldn’t stop myself from looking—one last glance out the window. He didn’t turn. Didn’t try to stop me. It was over. Truly over, before anything real had even begun.
Fuck him. I took a page from his playbook—and didn’t look back either.