Purr (Revenge Book 3)

by Burns, Trevion

  He bared his teeth at her. “What the fuck do you mean you didn’t break the lease?”

  Veda gasped. He’d never used that kind of language with her. The sound of it made her seal closed like a vacuum pack, unable to speak or move. Tears wet her eyes.

  Gage seemed to see it, the moisture filling her orbs, because he pushed off her like she was on fire, leaving the bed completely. He stood tall, appearing to soar so high that his head nearly touched the ceiling.

  Only when he was off her did Veda relax, sitting up while rapidly redoing the button and zipper on her jeans. Her hands shook so wildly it took a few tries to finish the job.

  The sight of her buttoning up seemed to snap something in him, raising his voice and reddening his cheeks. “Answer me, Veda.”

  Veda climbed off the bed on the opposite side, putting the entire mattress between them while crossing her arms tight. “I meant to deliver the letter of my intent to vacate, but I forgot about it. Missed the deadline by a few minutes.” The truth was she’d stared at that letter for hours, sitting right next to the list of names Linc had given her. She’d stared at that letter, and also at the clock. She’d watched the deadline as it ticked on by, second by agonizing second.

  It was as if Gage was reading her mind, his voice suddenly ripe with understanding, then accusation. “You never intended to deliver it.”

  Veda attempted to feign shock, but it was no use because she was unable to follow it up with fabricated words to counter the truth of his.

  “You don’t want to live with me,” he said, shaking his head, his voice hitching gently, reminiscent of a small child. “You don’t want to live with me anymore?”

  Veda lowered her eyes.

  “You don’t…. You—” He began sputtering, struggling for a while before whispering his next words, pain staining his eyes, speaking the words he could only guess were going through her head. Words that he assumed were trapped between her tightly pressed lips. “You don’t want to marry me anymore?”

  Veda splayed her fingers together, unable to speak.

  “Jesus, Veda. What in God’s name are you doing to me?” he begged, digging his hands into his hair. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” he screamed, yanking them out and holding them like claws in the air.

  Veda jolted as his voice rose even higher. Every time she was sure she knew just how loudly he could scream, he caught her off guard by hitting new territory.

  Tears bubbled over her eyes as she watched him, trying to see the old Gage. The Gage he’d been just one day earlier. She tried, but couldn’t. She couldn’t look at him the same.

  She knew she never would.

  She never would, knowing it was him.

  Knowing he was ten.

  She covered her mouth when a sob threatened to leave it, because she didn’t want to believe it.

  She still didn’t want to believe it.

  Jake had been right all along. About the power of denial. Even right then, with the truth staring her in the face, with the truth sitting in her back pocket, she still didn’t want to accept it. She still wanted to cross that bed and take him in her arms, cuddle his wounded face into her breasts and whisper how much she really did love him, how much she really did want to live with him, and how much she really did want to marry him.

  The scariest part was that it would be half true. Half of her body still yearned to be wrong.

  But she remembered those sneakers like the back of her hand, and he was the only person on Shadow Rock Island who’d ever laid hands on them.

  She couldn’t ignore that fact.

  She couldn’t ignore that truth.

  No matter how badly her heart wanted her to.

  “Is this whole thing just a game to you, Veda?” he asked, struggling to speak clearly as his eyes searched her face. “Because this isn’t a game to me.” His chest rose and fell faster with each passing second. He motioned to the door. “Why am I renting moving trucks, and calling wedding venues, and fighting for boardroom seats, all for a woman who can’t even answer the simple question of whether or not she wants to live with me? Whether or not she wants to be with me? Whether or not she wants to marry me? Why am I tearing myself to pieces, Veda, constantly, for a woman who refuses to do the same for me?”

  If only he knew. If only he knew how torn up she was right then, how torn up she’d been for ten long years. If only he knew that he’d had a hand in it. When a shot of anger raced through her, Veda opened her mouth to scream at him. To demand he explain himself. To demand answers. To demand regret, remorse, vindication from the pain he’d caused her, but she couldn’t.

  Because some part of her body—the most foolish part—still didn’t believe he had, and that part of her body was rapidly proving itself much stronger than all the rest.

  So nothing came.

  Veda’s teeth chattered, and her eyes fell. “Gage, I’m….”

  He leaned forward at the waist, eyes glistening under the moonlight spilling into the bedroom, craning his ear toward her, waiting with bated breath for her answer.

  “I’m….” Veda’s lips curled down as she fought tears. “Confused.”

  He heaved out a rapid breath. His own bared teeth began to quake, chattering softly. Still bent at the waist, he covered his heart with his hand, his fingers trembling wildly.

  “You’re confused,” he repeated, his voice shaking just as badly as his hands, too weak now to even scream. “You’re confused, Veda?”

  Veda clapped her hands over her face to stifle the soft cry, to hide herself from him, terrified that he would be able to see the truth in her eyes.

  “You’re confused!” His voice cracked as he screamed across the bed. “I asked you to marry me. You said yes. How the fuck could you be confused? How?”

  Veda’s hands collapsed at her sides, and that time it was she who had to fight to keep her voice from rising. She glared at him, barely able to bite her tongue around the words she knew she couldn’t say. Thankfully, she managed.

  “Do you even love me?” he demanded, his chest heaving, his own eyes growing shock red the moment the question left his mouth. When he was met with silence, his scream moved to a roar, so powerful it was a wonder it didn’t shatter the glass windows. “Did you ever love me?” He leaned on the bed, eyes boring into hers. When the silence went on for longer than he cared for, he shoved off the mattress and circled the bed, coming for her in rapid strides.

  The sudden movement made Veda jolt and stumble backward, not stopping until she ran into the wall.

  Taken aback at her reaction to him simply trying to move closer, Gage came to an immediate halt at the foot of the bed, visibly stricken. He heaved out each breath through puckered lips, like he’d just run an Olympic sprint, like he was doing everything he could to hold himself together.

  His hand covered his heart once more, and he let another moment of quiet fall in before he spoke again. “I love you… more than words can say, Veda. But I feel like the more I love you, the wider this… this vat of white noise between you and I seems to get. The more I love you, the farther I move away from whatever planet you’re always on. Damn it, Veda, why can’t you just talk to me?” he begged. “Just talk to me, baby. Please.”

  Tears spilled over Veda’s eyes. She slapped them away, even as fresh ones bopped out each second.

  What could she say?

  That she had proof he’d been on the balcony on the worst night of her life?

  That he’d played a role in the very attack that had created the broken woman who couldn’t respond to him in that moment? The woman who couldn’t open up? The woman who couldn’t trust?

  That just a few days earlier she’d believed, down to her very bones, that he wasn’t her number ten. That his heart couldn’t be capable of it. That she could never love a man so fully who could hurt her so badly.

  That with one scribbled list, Lincoln Hill had blasted all of her denials, and her delusions, into complete dust?

  She couldn’t s
ay any of it.

  “One minute you love me, and the next you can’t even talk to me. I guess I don’t deserve a real response from you right now. I guess you don’t actually give a damn about me, do you?” His skin ebbed red from head to toe when she didn’t respond. And her lack of response broke something in him. “Goddamn it, Veda, where are you?”

  She released a cry.

  “Talk to me!”

  She couldn’t.

  He took a step back and looked away.

  Silence.

  Then he laughed. His smiling gaze stayed gone for a while, but when it returned to her the anger lingering under the surface was hard at work washing away the facetious grin on his face. “Maybe if I was some asshole cop who treated you like shit half the time, you’d be more inclined to show me a little respect. Maybe if I was some asshole cop who treated you like shit I wouldn’t have to beg you just to make love every night. Maybe if I was some asshole cop you wouldn’t disappear at all hours of the night thinking I don’t notice, Veda!”

  She sucked in a breath, her wide eyes reaching across the room and nearly incinerating him.

  He pointed at her. “You know, I saw you. I saw you and him, hugging on the pier earlier today. And I didn’t get angry. I didn’t lose my mind. You know what I did, Veda? I thought about how much I loved you. How much I trusted you. How stupid I’d been to let myself believe you’d ever betray me when our relationship was stronger than it’s ever been. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? That was a fucking illusion. We’re not strong. We never have been. You’ve never given to me what you give to him. Never.”

  Veda hadn’t realized she’d pushed her body into a corner until she found herself with nowhere to go when he circled the bed and approached her, his eyes on fire.

  “I gave up everything for you,” he said, his voice so low it scratched, coming within arm’s reach of her. He seemed bigger, his arms harder, his stance stronger, taller. Even as his voice lowered to a whisper, it hit her like he was screaming. “Even after the stunt you pulled at dinner with my family. With my mother. I didn’t turn my back on you. Did I?”

  Her own teeth bared and she challenged him, coming to her toes when they nearly came chest to chest. “I’m not a Blackwater.” When he reached for her cheeks, she swatted his hands away from her face. “I will never be a Blackwater.”

  “That ring on your finger says different.” No response, and as both their chests heaved out of control, he shook his head and took a healthy step away from her. He shoved his fingers through his hair, eyes darting all over the room, stopping at the floor as he pressed his hands to his hips. He took a moment to wrestle with the thoughts in his head, unable to meet her eyes when he finally spoke, voice defeated. “I can’t do this, Veda. I can’t survive this. I can’t survive you. You’re a thousand miles away. All the time. Light-years away. Someplace I can’t reach you. I can’t marry a woman who’s so up and down. I can’t. I won’t.”

  And there it was. Even as he said the words she knew were coming, the words she knew were inevitable in that moment, they still split her heart in two.

  He leaned his hands on the wall on either side of her head. “Say. Something.” He slammed his fist into the wall. “Say something!”

  Veda searched his eyes. She watched the never-ending wave of emotion that was washing over them like a tidal wave, amazed at how much they spoke all on their own.

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Veda, if you don’t say something… right now….” He sucked in a breath through flared nostrils. “This is over.”

  Her eyes fell to his bare feet, and the vision of those sneakers flashed through her mind. The feeling of being trapped. The feeling of her space being stolen from her. Her space no longer belonging to her.

  And when she lifted her eyes back up to his, she felt the anger in them. The hatred.

  “This is over.” His eyes were there to claim hers, reading her like a book, his own gaze gleaming with the emotion surely ripping him apart. “Isn’t it?”

  Veda held his gaze, holding her breath, unable to respond. Unable to tell him that it had been over the moment she’d learned the truth.

  The moment she’d learned that all men really were animals. That there really was no light bright enough to extinguish the darkness inside her.

  At least not a light that any man could cast.

  He stepped back, taking her silence like a punch to the face, hesitated, and then turned away from her completely, circling the bed. He snatched up the clothes he’d removed, each article with a little more ferocity than the last, before making his way to the door.

  “I’m going to return the moving truck,” he said, pausing in the doorway and turning to her. He hesitated and then motioned to her with the handful of clothes under his trembling hand. He was silent for another moment, as if her final chance to speak up had not yet finished ticking by. As if she still had a few more precious seconds to open her mouth and stop him. To save them. When those precious seconds elapsed, his lips drew into a hard line and something in his eyes died. “Don’t be here when I get back.”

  With wide eyes, she watched him disappear around the corner. His heavy footsteps pounded down the hallway and then the stairs. Only when she heard the moving truck rumble to a start and tear down the road, tires screeching the whole way, did she allow the bile that had been threatening her throat, stealing her voice, to rise.

  Racing across the bedroom, setting her hand on the bed for leverage, she barreled into the master bathroom, making it to the toilet just in time to fall to her knees and empty her stomach into the bowl.

  28

  “Veda, if our friends won’t tell us, no one will, right?” Hope said days later, putting her car in park on the rocky black cliff, isolated at the edge of the island. She turned to the passenger seat, squinting an apologetic eye at her friend. “As your friend, I have to say, you look like absolute, and I mean absolute, shit.”

  Veda watched Hope blankly. “As much as I appreciate having friends who find it impossible to bite their tongues and spare my feelings, you’re really not giving me brand new information.”

  “But hey, you are losing mad weight. That’s always good news, right? You’re approaching fashion runway, third-world level skinny.”

  “Yeah, puking violently every night because your stomach is too sick to hold down food tends to shed the pounds pretty fast.”

  Hope took a deep breath. “It’s better that you know.” She made a face when Veda didn’t respond. “Isn’t it?”

  Veda gazed out the windshield, toward the edge of the mountainous cliff a few hundred feet away. Even though it was a full moon that night, the moonlight glowed more subtly than usual, only casting a dim light on the very edge of the cliff, like a spotlight in a dark arena. The rest of the surroundings, the sky, the water, and the coastal sands below, all went pitch black. The only indication that they were even on a beach was the sound of the waves rolling and colliding with the seashore, and the hint of ocean mist that always permeated the air.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Veda admitted.

  “Sometimes you wonder… what?” Hope demanded. “If you’d be better off sharing a bed with ten, having no idea he’s ten?”

  Veda realized how crazy it sounded when said out loud, and all she could do was take a deep breath in response. Then she looked across the car’s dash. “He’ll be here any minute. Remember how we practiced it, okay?”

  Hope nodded sharply. “I got you, V.”

  With a sigh, Veda took one more long, lingering look at the cliff, and then opened the passenger door. Hope’s gentle, reassuring touch brushed her arm just before she stepped out, and Veda was surprised when it actually helped relax her.

  She slammed the door closed and shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans as Hope pulled away, like they’d planned. The crunch of the car wheels grew softer the farther the car moved away, until Veda could barely hear it at all.

  She looked down at her jeans, wri
nkled to within an inch of their life, along with the white T-shirt she’d dug out of the back of her dresser drawer. Her hair, which she hadn’t combed in days—not since her blowout with Gage—sat in a bun on the top of her head, but even the top knot wasn’t enough to disguise what a mess she was. Her makeup-free face, eyes swollen from crying, with bags heavy enough to check in for a flight, and dry, cracking lips that left no question to her abysmal state of mind.

  She tried to breathe past the pain in her heart, and when she couldn’t, she grew frustrated. So frustrated, she made a promise to herself. The same promise she’d been making to herself since breaking up with Gage. She replayed it in her head over and over as she began toward the edge of the cliff, her sneakers unsteady on the black rocks.

  She promised herself to never enter another romantic relationship again.

  She promised herself to never fall for another man again.

  She promised herself to keep her distance from anyone who offered her affection and companionship. Not just romantically, but congenially as well.

  She re-entered a silent pact with the old Veda Vandyke.

  No connections.

  No relationships.

  No friends.

  She’d keep the few friends she’d already been foolish enough to make—Coco, Jake, Hope—because she knew her heart wouldn’t be able to handle losing them too.

  She swore to never set herself up for this kind of pain again. To never again be taken hostage by thoughts of what she’d lost. Thoughts of his face, his soft hair, his chiseled body. His voice, his taste, his smell.

  She tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t, the ocean scent getting trapped in her throat when the sob that had taken up residence there proved it had no plans on relocating.

  Thankfully she was able to swallow back the sob. When she made it to the edge of the cliff, gazing out onto the ebony waters and the spotlight the moon cast on the waves, it was the most incredible reminder of why she’d come home.

  She remembered standing on that very cliff several months before, staring across the beach at the white stone mansion glowing from its own cliff in the far distance. This was where she’d first made a promise to herself: get in, exact revenge, get out.