Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I blinked.
Surely, I’m hallucinating .
Shock lanced through me. “Cole?” I whispered, but I couldn’t be staring at him because I sat on his lap.
Confusion muddled my mind, and a dull ache formed at my temples.
If Cole stood across the room and Cole also sat underneath me…
Huh?
There are two Coles?
Something wasn’t fucking adding up.
Am I drunk? Did someone slip a drug into my drink that was making me see shit? Was Gianna here? Had she done it?
The questions and doubts tumbled in one after the other, overloading my brain. I just stared with uncertainty.
He looked like Cole. Spitting fucking image actually. It was like I glanced into a mirror and saw Cole’s reflection staring back at me.
And yet, he wasn’t naked on the bed but dressed in khaki shorts and a polo, as if he’d just come off the golf course, with a familiar boyish grin curling on his lips. “Hey, Quinn.”
I choked. That voice. It was so damn similar but lighter and perhap s less serious. “What the fuck is going on?” I asked, my gaze volleying between the two identical guys.
The Cole in the doorway leaned a shoulder against the frame. “I can see you’ve been busy. I’m a little disappointed it’s not me in bed with you, but Crew and I’ve been down that road before, haven’t we, bro? What happened to our agreement?”
What fucking agreement?
But the question would have to wait because my mind got hung up on the mention of Crew.
“Cole,” the guy underneath me growled. I felt the vibrations of his chest. His eyes turned into a swirling storm as he glowered at his brother, harsh lines forming on his lips.
Crew. The Cole in the doorway had called the one in bed with me Crew.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
“You’re Crew?” I whispered, my arms falling from where they’d been resting on his shoulders. My gaze narrowed, daring him to lie, to continue the charade he’d been keeping up for weeks.
“Does it matter what my name is?” Such brutal, unapologetic fucking honesty exuded from him. I hardly recognized him from the guy who’d been inside me not long ago.
“Yes!” I shrieked, climbing off him and the bed. I took the sheet with me, securing the material like a cloak around me. “You lied to me. You made me believe you were someone else. Why would you do that?” Even as the accusations left my mouth, they were unreal. They were bitter and alien.
He flinched, but it was barely a blink, and he continued to sit unashamedly naked in the middle of his bed. “It’s complicated.”
“That’s such a bullshit answer,” I hissed, fury spiking in my blood. “It’s a cop-out and you know it. Be a fucking man and tell me the truth.”
Neither Crew nor Cole said anything, and I was damn sick of their silence.
“All this fucking time?” I demanded, my temper licking in my voice.
The scowl I’d come to find somehow enduring appeared on Crew’s lips as he shook his head. “No.”
That scowl now only infuriated me. “Are you saying sometimes I was with C ole?” I asked, doing my best to make sense of a fucked-up situation. I suddenly felt like a toy to two assholes.
“I saw you first,” Cole said from the doorway, and my gaze flew to him. He winked.
Pressure grew in my chest, digging deeper into my heart—hell, into my soul. “In the pool…that was you?”
“When I caught you skinny-dipping.”
I couldn’t breathe. “What agreement?” I gritted out, my nose crinkling as I sent Crew a withering glare.
Crew blinked.
“You—he,” I corrected, “said you had an agreement. What was it?” I repeated.
Crew raked a hand through his hair. “That neither of us would sleep with you,” he finally answered roughly as if the words were stuck inside him like telling the truth hurt. Perhaps it did, but his discomfort mattered little to me.
I scoffed, my mouth dropping. “Clearly, trust is an issue in this family.” I turned to Cole. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I slept with your brother.”
“I could tell you that you chose wrong, but you’ll figure it out,” Cole said coolly just as self-assured as Crew. No fucking wonder I hadn’t been able to tell a difference.
“I thought you were the same person!” I snapped back, my voice rising to a near scream. My initial shock had given way to anger, and it simmered in my blood, desperate to be unleashed. I had to do something.
Twisting, I grabbed the first thing my hands could find and hurled it across the room at Cole. The candle hit the wall to his left, falling to the floor with a smash, but the glass didn’t break, only rolled across the floor. I stared at the hole in the wall before shifting my gaze to Cole. “And I’m not choosing either of you.”
“This is a side I never got to see. I can tell why you’re so intrigued,” Cole said to Crew.
In my surging panic, I noticed only one difference between them.
The lip ring.
Crew had one but Cole didn’t.
My mind clung to the difference, flipping through memories in an att empt to decipher who had been who over the last month. Which twin had I shared which moment with?
Cole shifted his weight from where he still lingered in the doorway. He kept his distance. A smart move.
Cole . He was Cole. God, my mind still had a hard time processing and accepting the truth.
“Why?” I replied icily. “Is this some sort of twisted game you play on poor girls when you’re bored with your life?”
The gold flecks in his eyes glittered with the first signs of anger. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like? Explain it to me. Because from where I sit, what you did was fucked up on so many levels.” I didn’t even know why I was still here. Why hadn’t I stormed out? Nothing either of them could say would rationalize why they had tricked me for weeks.
Crew opened his mouth to say something just as Cole’s gaze moved to the side as if he heard something. And then a head appeared below Cole’s shoulder as someone tried to peek around him inside the room. “I heard a crash. Is everything?—”
She saw me at the same moment I saw her.
Gianna.
I bristled, wishing I had something else to throw. “What the hell is she doing here?”
Gianna shot me a glower of pure hatred when she saw I was naked and the guy she was obsessed with was also very naked. There was no mistaking what Crew and I’d been doing.
Crew leaned over the side of the bed, plucking his pants off the floor and slipping them on as if he realized this was a conversation that required him to cover up his balls.
“What are you doing in Crew’s bedroom?” she fired back, her evil eyes glaring to narrowed slits.
My vision went red. “Fucking him,” I hurled at her with a smug satisfying smirk, forgetting my outrage at Cole and Crew momentarily.
The bitch flinched a second before the viper inside her unshackled. “I’m going to kill you,” she hissed, shoving past Cole, but unfortunately for Gianna, he had quick reflexes and snaked an arm around her waist, keeping her from attacking me .
But no one was stopping me. And my composure unraveled. “You already tried,” I growled right before I lunged for her, eager to rake my nails down her face and rip out her hair.
I made it two steps when Crew grabbed me around my waist. “Cole, get her the fuck out of here before I kill her,” he seethed.
Despite Crew’s strength, I gave him hell, making it difficult for him to keep me from shredding Gianna to bloody bits. I barely made any headway, and I held on to hope he would let his guard down. “Why did you stop me?” I said from between clenched teeth, a bit breathy from fighting against him. “I could have handled her. Have you forgotten she tried to kill me?”
“It wasn’t me,” Gianna refuted, giving me a cold, ruthless glare. “But now I wish it had been.”
Crew’s arms hadn’t eased an inch like he knew I would take the first opportunity to strike out at the bitch. What I didn’t understand was why he didn’t let me. “I know, Killer, which is precisely why I stopped you,” he murmured into my ear, blissfully ignoring Gianna.
I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her, let alone under the same roof. “She hurt Frankie.”
Cole grabbed Gianna’s arm as she tried to brush past him, but he couldn’t stop her mouth from flapping. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. And you think I’m the psycho.”
“Everyone needs to chill. Take a breath,” Cole said, centering himself between Gianna and me while keeping a firm grip on her.
Too much happened at once. I couldn’t decide which problem to focus on first. Not that I cared about Gianna’s outrage. Mine took center stage. Her problems couldn’t compare to the shit I was going through. Redirecting my anger, I pinned Cole with a look of disdain. “You’re twins,” I hurled across the room, stating the obvious. How the fuck did I not know?
My negligence couldn’t be fully accountable for the deception Cole and Crew created. These assholes deliberately took advantage of me and my naivety.
Perhaps they were too arrogant at first to believe anyone wouldn’t know about their birth status. They probably hadn’t counted on me. I made it my business not to care about the rich kids who breezed into town for a few weeks a year. They were an annoying blip in my life and hadn’t been worth my time. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard of the Rileys at all, but my information came from bits and pieces of conversation I picked up while working from the girls who came into the diner for coffee while gossiping about the previous night’s party. Cole’s and Crew’s names were more than often dropped, but I’d never overheard anything about twins.
I tossed my hair out of my face, my nostrils flaring. “Were you ever going to tell me? Or just keep laughing about me behind my back?”
Tension, thick and painful, stretched from my side of the room to the next. “It wasn’t like that,” Crew insisted, still holding me.
It was hard to make my mind forget how fucking wonderful it was to be in his arms. “So you keep saying, but I fail to see how it wasn’t. From where I stand, everything you’ve ever said and done has been a lie. One big, massive lie.”
“Wait. Let me get this straight. You didn’t know they were twins?” Gianna tossed her head back and cackled like the wicked witch. “Oh, this is rich. I can’t wait to?—”
She never finished her sentence. Crew released me and strode across the room, latching on to Gianna’s throat with his large, tatted hands. From where I stood, I saw his eyes flash with malice and genuine hatred for this girl. He pressed her against the wall, Cole’s hand on her arm falling away as he allowed Crew to take over. “Nothing leaves this room. Do you understand? Not a word of this to anyone. I don’t want to hear Arie’s name come out of your foul mouth ever again. If you so much as come within a mile of her, you’ll be trading your golden spoons for dumpster diving in the trash.”
I felt Cole’s eyes on me, watching me, but I couldn’t stop staring at Crew. The night of the hurricane when I’d snuck in to return the borrowed shirt from Cole came back to me, including how I’d been in a similar position Gianna found herself in. I’d had those fingers wrapped around my neck. I’d been backed into a wall.
It had been Crew that night. I’d been locked in the house with Crew for days, not Cole. This situation made me reevaluate every second I’d spent with…fuck, I didn’t even know which one.
Gianna’s fingers went to Crew’s as if she had any chance of prying them o ff her throat. “What the hell is wrong with you? What makes her so special?” she rasped, her features drawn with a hint of surprise reflecting in her hazel eyes.
I moved forward, unsure what I planned to do, but Cole held out an arm, signaling for me not to interfere, or perhaps he was protecting Gianna from me. I couldn’t decide.
Crew’s mouth twisted into an awful sneer. “She’s everything you could never be.”
Tears pricked Gianna’s eyes, yet I still had no sympathy for her. “Why? Because she fucked you first instead of Cole?”
Crew’s eyes darkened, his nostrils flared, and for a heartbeat, I thought he might hit her. He surely wanted to, but he held back, his control intact despite the heaps of anger trembling off him.
I didn’t have such control.
And I would have slapped her if it hadn’t been for Cole stepping in my path. I scowled at him, my fingers trembling. He was lucky I didn’t have both hands free.
“Are you jealous? Is that why you sent that guy after her?” Crew demanded, unaffected by what went on behind him. His cold focus stayed on Gianna.
“What are you talking about? What guy?” I had to give her credit for her performance. She put on a convincing show. I almost believed the clueless confusion on her expression.
Crew’s fingers flexed on her throat. “Don’t play with me, Gianna. I know it was you who had him break into my house and then throw the brick into the window.”
“So what? All I did was try and scare her,” she admitted, surprising me. She was shameless in her wickedness. “Obviously, it didn’t work.”
“And when you hired someone to stab her? Was that meant to scare her as well or kill her?” Crew pressed, not letting up an inch.
“Stab?” Gianna’s throat bobbed. “I never hired anyone to hurt her, let alone kill her. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a murderer. How could you think?—”
A shadow flickered in Crew’s eyes that sent a chill down my spine as he cut her off. “Don’t fucking lie to me. ”
Gianna shook her head, realizing he wasn’t joking, her snideness morphing into fear. “I didn’t do it. I swear. It wasn’t me.”
“If it wasn’t you, then who?” he demanded roughly.
I didn’t like the look Gianna and Crew shared, a moment of insight as if they came up with a person at the same time. If not Gianna, then who else would benefit from my death?
I came up blank, and I wanted to scream for one of them to give me the answer.
Then it hit me. The two people who benefited most from removing me from the Gianna, Cole, and Crew equation were…
Cole’s father and…Gianna’s father.
Their names went off in my head like a bomb.
I couldn’t fathom either one of them putting a hit on someone like me. How could I possibly be a threat? Either Cole or Crew had introduced me to their father as his fiancée at the masked party, but I couldn’t sort through my memories fast enough to pinpoint which twin I’d gone with.
Arranged marriages in my world were ancient. No one did them. To treat a union such as marriage like a business deal churned my stomach, but humans were known to do far worse for wealth and power. Why not sell your son?
The fingers around Gianna’s throat loosened but didn’t altogether release her. She took in a greedy breath as Crew said, “It was your father.”
Behind me, Cole stiffened, the fingers at my hips boring a bit deeper into my flesh.
Gianna’s eyes wobbled as she stared at Crew, considering. Her head shook again. “He wouldn’t.”
Crew’s arms fell to his sides. “We both know he would. We know what our fathers are capable of. If this deal between our families doesn’t happen, he stands to lose a lot of money.”
A shift occurred in Gianna. Her proud chin dipped, and the defiance in her expression that had been slowly waning dissipated completely. She looked defeated. “We’re broke. He lost it all,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice.
When I heard that admission and understood the motive driving her father, my back slumped against Cole’s chest .
“How?” Crew’s voice hadn’t lost its harshness. He was merciless in his quest to uncover the truth.
Her shoulders went slack as she averted her gaze from Crew’s. “I don’t know, bad business decisions. You know I’m not involved in my father’s dealings.” Shame deepened the color in her cheeks. How much it must have cost her pride to admit such a thing.
“No, you and your sister just spend it.” He lashed out with words meant to make her feel insignificant and foolish. “Fuck,” he said under his breath, shoving a hand into his disheveled, dark hair.
I blinked and the next thing I knew, there was a hole in the wall beside Gianna’s head, and Crew’s knuckles were bleeding. My body had a delayed reaction to the sound his fist made going into the wall, jumping seconds later.
“Crew,” I murmured, his name sounding so odd on my lips. It was the first time I’d called him by his name, and I wasn’t the only one who found it foreign.
He flinched, only the slightest acknowledgment he heard me, but I saw the way his body changed, losing some of its aggressive hardness. “I want you to give your father a message,” he growled at Gianna.
Her eyes glistened with tears.
“If he ever tries to hurt Arie again, he’s a dead man. His problems aren’t mine. They’re his mistakes. He can clean them up. I’m not my brother. I have no qualms about hurting you or your father.”
Gianna tortured herself further by asking, “What do you see in her?” A tinge of her brassiness poked through. This girl didn’t know when to leave shit alone.
Cole remained quiet behind me, but I felt him inhale, waiting for his brother to answer.
“She’s everything you’re not,” Crew whispered, but we all heard.
My heart crossed me, thumping in my chest at his words.
“You won’t marry me, will you?” Gianna murmured, tears shining in her hazel eyes. “How could you want her over me?” She still believed it unfathomable Crew would ever choose me over her—that he’d want someone she believed was so underneath her.
“That’s your answer, Gianna. I hate the way you think you’re better than others. I will never forgive you for what you did to Cole. Never. Now ge t the fuck out of here before I do something you’ll regret. I don’t want to see you again. Do you understand?”
“It’s fine. I’m leaving,” I cut in before Gianna could say anything further to shred my character and integrity. She might not have ordered the attack that hurt my best friend, but she remained unforgivable in my eyes. “Enjoy my trashing seconds. You can have them both for all I care.” I stepped away from Cole, my spine straightening despite the way my heart splintered.
“You surely did,” she sneered, the snooty sarcasm returning as she sniffled back tears.
My lips curled. “And I bet that just burns your ass.” My eyes bounced between Cole and Crew. I still had so much I wanted to say, but I had to leave. I couldn’t be in this house for another second. I was done with their lies.
I was done with the twins.
Somehow, I steadied my voice, sounding far stronger than I felt, and said with as much conviction as I could dredge up, “I never want to see either of you again. Stay the hell away from me.” My expression might have been the perfect projection of hurt, anger, and determination, but inside, I was a trembling, broken mess.
Crew took a step toward me, but Cole stopped him, putting a hand on his brother’s chest. Thank fucking God. I don’t know what I would have done if Crew touched me just then. Most likely, I would have fallen apart. And so for what felt like the millionth time, I ran out of this house, determined it would be my last this time…for good.
It had been a mistake to come here. One I would have to live with, but at least I’d finally gotten answers—even if they hurt like fucking hell.