Chapter 15 #2
I bite down on the inside of my lip but keep swiping. I do not know what that makes me except unwilling to look away. I want all of it. Every date. Every angle. Every detail. I want to see, without mercy, the kind of man I have been wasting my tears, my blood, my sweat on.
My fingers turn unsteady around the phone as I scroll upward through the thread.
There are older messages above the photo dump, brief and vicious in their restraint.
You really have no idea who you married, do you?
He lied. You swallowed it whole. Embarrassing, really.
I do wonder which will break you more—what he did, or how long you let him do it.
I can’t wait to see what this little gift does to you.
Below that sits another attachment.
A video.
The caption beneath it is just as taunting.
Just in case he didn’t tell you.
My pulse kicks hard enough to make my thumb stall over the screen.
I press play.
The file takes half a second to load. Grainy footage blooms across the screen, black and white, fixed angle, a timestamp in the upper corner.
Five years ago.
I stop breathing.
A service corridor. Concrete walls. Industrial lighting. Back-of-house at the O2.
Two figures step into frame. A broad man in a dark suit. A woman in training gear.
My whole body goes still. Confusion strikes first. Recognition follows so hard it feels like impact.
Sasha Lenosky.
The name lands in me like something dropped down a shaft.
I know that stance. That build. I would know the shape of her anywhere. She was there on the worst night of my life. The night one body shot changed everything. The night pain split me open so cleanly I did not understand how bad it was until later. I know those hands.
A warning bell rings low in my chest. I ignore it.
Another tall figure steps into frame.
Black long-sleeved shirt. Dark sweatpants. Hair just long enough to brush the nape of his collar.
I know who it is before he lifts his face .
Something hot and sick floods through me as I watch the man I have loved for seven years go straight to them.
No hesitation. No pause to take in where he is or who he is looking at. He moves like a man arriving exactly where he meant to be.
Xavier stops in front of them. He hands over some sort of document, and she passes him a little box in return. Their mouths are moving, but the footage gives me nothing.
He pockets it without even looking down.
The suited man reaches for Xavier’s hand. A second later, all three of them are laughing, like they are sharing some private joke.
I stare harder, desperate for distortion. A glitch. The telltale wrongness of something fabricated. Anything that will let me believe this is not what it looks like.
But the footage holds.
Xavier met with my opponent before our fight.
My breath snags on the thought.
No.
Because that would mean none of it was an accident.
My mind skids into a cold, mechanical kind of override, every thought flattening into the same terrible line.
I close the video, open his contact, and hit call.
He picks up on the first ring.
“Amor.” The unmistakable patter of rain against concrete in the background nearly drowns out the strain in his voice, but I hear it all the same. “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry.
That word has been following me for days.
The question wedged in my throat comes out rough, torn on the way up. “Where are you?”
“I’m outs—”
I hang up and walk out of the room.
The house is dark. I do not turn on any lights.
Moonlight streaks across the staircase, enough to get me down while the rest of me moves on instinct.
My leg clips the furniture on the landing once, then again.
Pain barely registers. Only the slick trail running down my knee tells me I have struck hard enough to break skin.
Cold air seeps through the front door before I even reach it, carrying the scent of rain. My nightwear is almost weightless, but I still feel overheated, my skin burning with a kind of fever that has nothing to do with temperature.
My hand closes around the doorknob. I unlatch the lock and pull the door open without thinking.
The rest is a blur until I see him.
He is standing outside yiayia’s gate in the heavy rain, soaked through, his suit still on, as if he came straight from work. He looks like he has been standing there a long time.
I take him in, from the rain streaming off his hair to the eyes I once trusted to hold nothing but love for me.
My feet carry me forward. Only when something cold and slick presses against my sole do I realize I am barefoot, standing in the rain with the iron bars between us as the last barrier left.
Thunder cracks overhead, lighting up his face. I see everything—the disheveled hair, the purple smudges of exhaustion beneath his eyes, the pain churning there, dark and restless.
He looks like hell.
The second I shove the gate open, he closes the distance between us as though the space itself has been unbearable. His suit jacket is off in one motion and around my shoulders in the next. His gaze sweeps over me from head to toe before he pulls me into a tight embrace.
I stand there inside the circle of his arms, rigid and absent, looking past his shoulder into the void, searching for the place where the light used to reach me.
It feels as though I have gone weightless inside my own body, suspended somewhere outside it, while the rest of the world keeps moving without me.
The darkness feels intent on dragging me under.
“Why did you come out here, amor?” he says when he finally pulls back to look at me. “You’re freezing.”
His gaze drops. He sees the blood ribboning down my shin, the mud slicked over my bare feet, and something in his expression tightens. Without a word, he strips off his shoes, catches my wrist, and sets my hand on his shoulder before lowering himself onto the ground.
He wipes the mud from one foot with the flat of his palm, then the other. He slides his shoes onto my feet and rises again in nothing but soaked socks, his dress shirt plastered to his body, rainwater running dark over the cuffs of his trousers.
The gentleness of it feels obscene.
Can a man touch you like this and still be the reason your life fell apart?
“Why?” My voice cracks, so small I think for a second he didn’t hear me. “Why did you do it?”
His throat works. He drags two fingers over his eyes and down his face, rain and exhaustion and something wrecked clinging to every line of him. “Please.” His voice roughens on the word. “Please, amor. Just give me a chance to explain. I swear to you, I will tell you nothing but the truth.”
Rain hammers the stone between us. Somewhere behind me, thunder rolls over the house and out toward the sea.
“Please,” he says again, and the desperation in his voice is enough to move mountains. “I know how this looks. But it is not what you think. The pictures with Isabel are—”
“You met with Sasha Lenosky before my fight,” I cut in.
The color drains from his face so fast it tells me everything.
It was real.
A sick, hollow feeling opens inside me. I did not think it was possible to feel more shattered than I already do.
I am wrong.
His breathing turns uneven, as though whatever comes next will crack open something he has been holding shut for years.
When he speaks, his voice is so unfamiliar it barely sounds like his.
“Yes,” he says. “Sasha was never supposed to be in that ring with you.”