He looked back to the broken glass. “It will end with us.”
Forty-Five
STORY
I carried Lottie back to her and Grayson’s wing, but we stopped a few feet from the guards. Hidden in an alcove with a small bench, gold lattice windowpanes at our back.
“This is as far as they’ll let you go,” she said softly.
I swallowed, because I knew. Even if I had Lottie to escort me, they wouldn’t let me in. I was banned from being with Grayson as much as Grayson was banned from being with me.
“Thank you,” Lottie said.
“It’s kind of overdue. I was a shitty girl.”
“I was a worse mistress.”
We both paused.
“Do you think my brother is right?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I think he is,” she said. “I think I gave up everything that made me me.” She stared down the long, lonely hallway. “I want to go back to before. I want to take it all back. Every action, every word, every thought that made me this person. But… I don’t know how far back I have to go.” She looked at me, fear and anguish ripping apart her pretty face.
God.
I knew that. I knew that so much.
How do you go back to before?
“Did it start when I loved him? Or when he first chose another girl? Or is it when my mother started telling me the reasons why it’s my fault he chooses other girls. Or is it when I started to love, really love, yet another man who could never love me—”
She snapped her mouth shut suddenly.
Another tense silence passed with only the sound of the soft breeze.
After a minute, she wiped her tears away and said, “How do I get rid of the rust on my heart, Story?”
“I don’t know if we ever get rid of the rust on our hearts,” I said. “Or if we do, it takes a lot of work.”
“It hurts.”
I nodded, because…yeah.
It did.
Another few moments passed, and still Lottie didn’t move to go down the hallway. I held her, and some of the color had returned to her face at least.
“Why did you become West’s mistress?” she asked quietly. “Really?”
“I’m sure you know about the postnup…” As she’d had to sign it. Lottie nodded, and I continued, “Grayson sent that, video evidence, and everything needed to free us—and destroy himself and his family—to West. It was Grayson’s solution.”
“But he would have been so miserable,” Lottie parroted my words back to me.
“So West offered me a solution. I’m trying to get it all back, to delete it.” It felt like a lifetime ago when it all happened.
Her eyes grew. “Are you close?”
I fell to the bench, tears clogging my throat. All I could do was shake my head. Lottie sat beside me.
“He told me he’d give me everything if I chose him over Grayson. I can’t ever do that.” I exhaled, staring at my lap.
“Every day for the past month, I’ve slept in his bed and tried every password combination I could think of while he slept. I didn’t know what else to do—”
“Story.” Lottie gripped my forearm so tight it bruised.
I lifted my head, looking into earnest, warm brown eyes.
“What?”
“I know his password. He’s an idiot. He uses one password for everything, and like everyone else, he doesn’t think I’m paying attention.”
My mouth dried as blood rushed and pounded through my ears.
“It’s songbird,” she said, then shrugged like I don’t know why while inside I struggled to breathe.
Songbird.
I put my head in my hands. I would have never tried that, because the implication was too dark. That somewhere in his cold heart, West du Lac had a heart.
“Does that help?” she asked.
I nodded, because I still couldn’t breathe.
“Good. Every day I look at Grayson, at you, and I think of what I broke. You don’t… You probably won’t understand. You’ve probably never broken something so badly that you just stare at the shards and wonder how.”
I broke something priceless. I don’t expect you to believe me, but…I can’t live with myself if it ends this way.
The night I met Grayson and ruined everything, ruined them, flashed into my head.
“I have,” I said hoarsely.
“I want to fix it, Story. I don’t know how, but I need to fix it.”
It’d been months since I’d had any real moment with Grayson, just Grayson. There was so much I needed to tell him. I needed to know how he was doing—really doing. I needed to see him in person. I needed his sideways face.
I would risk anything.
I looked at her. Her hair was down, her curls soft and springy. I bet the guards couldn’t tell the difference between us.
If she gave me her pajamas…
“I shouldn’t ask it of you,” I said.
“Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do anything.”
GRAY
I left West passed out in the sand, a part of me wishing it was colder and he’d freeze to death. I walked past four servants carrying some massive metal abomination for the baby shower in the morning.
It looked like a fucking metal pumpkin.
Forget today’s shitshow, there’s no rest for the wicked. Literally.
On my way up to my wing, I nearly ran right into the triplets. We said nothing to one another. I should have fucking talked to them. How would that go? How did one end an entire lifetime of silence?
Now back in my wing, I couldn’t stop seeing Story’s face.
Her quiet stoicism that all at once enraged and enthralled me. She isn’t fucking fine. I know it, because as Story’s insides were gutted and bled across all of page six, I kept reading her letters.
Dear Atlas,
I miss you fucking me. I miss you going hard. I miss the bruises you’d leave.
You’re so gentle now, but I have a brutal fantasy.
I want you to take it.
I don’t want you to ask for permission.
I want you to rip him out of me. Rip the vines and tear out the thorns until we’re both bloody and there is no trace of him.
What is wrong with me?
I didn’t think anything was wrong with her, but something is definitely wrong with me. If she wasn’t pregnant with my child I would do exactly what she wanted.
I would take it.
I wouldn’t ask.
I’d rip out the piece of West twisting her apart.
A creak sounded and I shoved the phone behind my back, like a peeping Tom caught in the window. No matter how much work my mother put into Crowne Hall, it was still centuries old, the bones creaking.
A shadow stood near my stairs. I stood up, trying to see who had come into my wing. Lottie stood in her white silk pajamas. Why the hell was she here?
“Lottie?”
She was spectral in the moonlight, the salt breeze billowing wild, curly hair—hair like—
“Atlas.”
Forty-Six
STORY
Grayson’s phone slipped from his hand, falling to the hardwood with a clack. He rushed down the stairs to me, pulling me close but stopping so he could study me.
Everything about me.
Then he slammed his lips against mine, his kiss wine, getting my soul drunk.
“How?” he breathed against my lips, but he didn’t let me respond, kissing me again, biting at my bottom lip.
Only after he’d had his fill with me, could I tell him. “Lottie traded places with me.”
He laughed. “This is so fucked up, Snitch.”
“It was the only way I could see you. I needed to see you. I can’t stay past ten…” Past the time Lottie needed to be in her room.
And the time West would most likely expect me.
“Cinderella usually gets until midnight.” He gripped Lottie’s s
ilk and lace pajamas, then ripped them off my body. “There,” he breathed. “That’s fucking better.”
“What am I going to wear?”
“Nothing.” He palmed my stomach in the way that always stole air from my lungs, adding, “You’re going to my bed, but there are too many stairs—”
I laughed. “You and stairs. I can walk up stairs, Grayson.”
“I’m gonna carry you, little wife.”
“I’m too pregnant to threaten with that. You can’t lift me.” I gestured to my stomach.
His eyes darkened, and then he grinned. A full-on Grayson Crowne smile. That was the only warning I got before he swept me off my feet—literally.
I was tucked into a fireman’s carry, wrapping my arms around his neck in seconds.
“I’m too big for this—”
“Shut up, Snitch.”
He carried me up the stairs and to his bed effortlessly. When he set me on the mattress, his whole face changed. I swallowed, hot and cold and achy just by the look he was giving me.
Needing something to do, something other than crisscross my legs back and forth, I felt his silky, black sheets. “I missed your sheets.”
Grayson dragged a thumb along his bottom lip. “I’ll always miss you in my sheets, Snitch.”
Then slowly—finally—he got beside me, but he didn’t get in the sheets.
And I was strung out.
Just from the feather-distance between us.
“Kiss me,” I begged. “Please.”
“First, tell me all your words.” He dragged a knuckle down my cheeks. “The words they stole from you. The words you couldn’t say. The words they put in your mouth.” He lay on his side, head resting on one hand. Watching me. “How are you doing, really?”
I chewed my bottom lip.
I knew what he meant.
I knew what he wanted me to say.
Where to fucking begin?
I looked for a reason not to begin. My eyes landed on the nightstand, where the green handkerchief lay, the one from our wedding.
“Why is it there?”
“To remind me every day that you’re missing. That our happily ever after isn’t complete.” He thumbed my tears. “Snitch, please, bleed with me.”
I traced anxious lines across my stomach. “I never thought I’d have to justify my actions to millions of people. This is my love story, not theirs, but they’re acting like I know how it ends.”
I kept playing it over and over in my head like a record that wouldn’t stop skipping. Was all of this heartbreak pointless, and was it all my fault?
“Did I mess everything up? Should I have run with you that night?” I turned to him, and he was already looking at me. The moon and stars his backdrop, the shadow clinging like velvet to his pouty lips and soft eyes.
Grayson.
I’d missed this, nighttime—our time.
“They don’t get it.” He traced my lips with his thumb. “They can’t. I feel sorry, they must not know love. Every single one of those women would have jumped at the chance to run away with me, Story Hale. Only you had the guts to say no. Only you cared enough to say no. Only you had the strength.”
I couldn’t stop the tears from running.
Spilling down my cheeks and salting the pillow where I’d first opened my heart to him and all those nights after.
He didn’t thumb them away. “You’re the moon, Story Hale. Some people will want to snuff you out for no other reason than to bring you into their dark”
I paused as West’s words came back.
I am fucking worried about you, Angel. You’re the moon, and some people out there want to snuff you out for no other reason than to bring you into the dark.
But if I had to guess who said it first, it would always be my thorny prince.
He gripped my face so tight it bruised. “You are the only person in this goddamn universe looking out for me. You are the only person who loves me enough to be hated. You are the only person who loves me.”
I pressed my forehead to his. “I want to spend what hours I have with you, just with you.”
Not the press.
Not the public.
Just him.
So for a while we lay together, talking about everything and nothing.
With my cheek resting on two hands, I stared into Grayson’s deep eyes. “Did you give my uncle all that money?”
The way he bit his bottom lip and looked away let me know the answer was a solid yes.
“Why?”
“He was like a father to me. I would have given him everything, if I could.”
I swallowed the tears in my throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Grayson caressed his knuckles down my cheek. “It wasn’t my secret to share, little wife.”
I told Grayson of the cryptic letter my uncle left me, and how everything seemed to point back to Scotland. How I felt like I should know where it was.
“We’ve already looked everywhere,” I said. “I don’t understand why my uncle didn’t just tell me where it was or give it to me. Why all the secrecy?”
“Your uncle worked with us the longest out of anyone; he saw our darkest. He knew you weren’t ready. What would you have done if he handed you a coin on his deathbed?”
I worked my mouth. “I don’t know…probably forgotten about it. Lost it. Given it to someone…”
I probably would have tried to give it to a lawyer the day Grayson threatened me.
“I’m starting to worry…” I trailed off, chewing my bottom lip. “What if the coin is in Scotland? What if that’s why everything pointed there? What do we do then? My uncle wanted me to go, Josephine said I should have found it, the triplets were expecting me… What if it was in Scotland this whole time? What if we’re too late?”
He rolled away from me, staring at the ceiling. Silent.
After a minute, he spoke. “Would you still love me if I had to be the Crowne?”
I crawled closer to him, and he opened up his arm so I could sneak onto his chest. “What does that mean?”
He wrapped an arm around me, holding me closer to him. “I would be head of Crowne Industries.”
I sucked in a breath. “Like your grandfather.”
He nodded silently.
I traced the hard line of his jaw with my finger, the stubble prickly against my pad. “I would love you if you were destitute. If you were paralyzed. If you suddenly grew a thousand heads”—Grayson laughed—“but would you want to be that person?”
“Someone with a thousand heads? I don’t know—it would make buying hats a real bitch.”
I elbowed him and Grayson smiled at me, like the sun coming out after a storm.
For a while, we lay in silence. Because we didn’t really have answers to the big questions. So I was content to watch Grayson as the shadows stretched along the soft valleys of his lips and his chiseled cheeks.
“Are you ever going to talk to your siblings?” I asked.
He made a noise in his throat, shifting on the mattress like something hurt his back. And I knew then, without a doubt of certainty, what I said next was true.
“They’re a part of the reason you’re bleeding. I don’t think you’re ever going to be happy until you talk to them.”
He glanced down at me, lashes thicker in the dark. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I’ve been thinking…maybe we’re destined for pain.”
“Dark, Snitch.” He laughed—a throaty, deep sound that made his entire chest vibrate and bounce. A real laugh. I completely forgot what I was going to say next.
Gray lifted his head slightly, so I could see one shining blue eye beneath a silky lock, his crooked smile.
“Gonna finish that dark thought, little wife?”
“Um…” I trailed off. “Hear me out. I wish I could take the weight off your shoulders, Grayson. But if I take away your pain, I’ll rob you of the journey to peace.”
“Hmm…” He spun, and gently flipped me so I was on m
y back.
I lost my train of thought as he traced a pattern on my naked chest.
“Give me a secret, little nun.” He continued to trace that pattern, slow and deliberate.
He lifted his head, catching my eyes. He was somehow both boyish and roguish—and vulnerable. That unguarded, sleepy blue-eyed look that was all mine. I would die to protect it.
His lips were wet and redder from dragging them between his teeth, and they looked a little like when he ate too many suckers.
Every time you eat a sucker, any time you watch me eat one, know I’m thinking of fucking you. Of eating your cunt. But I won’t.
I exhaled steam, shifting, aching.
“Little nun,” he pressed.
He was hard, it tented his silk pajamas and pressed on my thigh.
“I…” I swallowed, trying to form words. “I…I’ve told you everything.”
A heart. He was tracing a heart.
He exhaled. “I wish you’d let me scrape the rust off your heart, Story.”
He pulled away and I felt the loss of his touch like stark winter wind. I was left shivering with goose bumps—aching, needy.
He held out his arm for me. “Let me hold you for a while, little wife.”
Hold? For months I’d been nothing but need, and he is the only thing that could sate it.
But I slide into his embrace.
A little while later, Grayson rubbed cocoa butter on my stomach, somewhere else in his head. He slid his soft touch near my breasts, then down deep, but never touching where I needed most. All the while, his eyes were far away, staring out at the moon as I grew hotter and hotter.
“What are you thinking?” I rasped.
His dark eyes slashed to mine. “If I can fuck you when you’re this close to having my baby.”
I swallowed a cough. “Oh.”
He grinned, wolfish, but continued the same taunting motion with his hand. Up and down, slow, and never touching the parts I wanted most.
“Fuck me. Please.”
Grayson froze, his palm on my stomach.
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