by Maisey Yates
As if that had ever been his call to make.
No wonder she’d been holding back from pushing her revenge plans into motion, even now when she was so close to the final act. No wonder it had taken so long. She’d still been afraid.
But she wasn’t any longer. She felt free.
When she started down the stairs again, she was smiling, for what felt like the first time. Maybe ever.
She saw Hunter as she rounded the last bend, sprawled out on that medicinally white couch of his, wearing nothing but a pair of exercise trousers low on his narrow hips. He looked sleepy and gorgeous, his dark blond hair rumpled and a hint of stubble on his jaw, making him look less pretty and more dangerous, which set off a little symphony of need inside her.
He made her feel insatiable. Greedy.
Beautiful and real.
Whole.
She moved toward him quietly, almost as if she was powerless to stop herself, and he didn’t look up as she approached, too busy watching at the television screen in front of him with an intensity she didn’t understand.
The volume was turned down so low she didn’t hear that voice until she was right behind Hunter on the far side of the sofa.
That voice. Jason Treffen.
Hunter’s television screen was so big it made Jason seem bigger than the wall. Bigger than life. Certainly big enough to destroy the tiny little lives he meddled in. Like Sarah’s. Like hers. He lounged like the king of the world on some morning show couch, smiling genially, looking like the honorable and trustworthy man Zoe had once believed he was.
And Hunter sat there before his image, like the acolyte she’d somehow forgotten he’d been back then. Hell, maybe he still was.
That was why she’d chosen him.
The fact that she liked him was just her own twisted perversity at play.
Hunter turned to look at her. His eyes narrowed much too shrewdly as he sat up, as if he could read all manner of terrible things right there on her face. As though she wasn’t maintaining that mask of hers any longer.
“Zoe?”
But she was looking at the screen, not at him.
“Zoe.”
It was a command, but she was so far away then, so very far away, and it took a long time to pull her gaze away from the television and focus on the first man she’d let touch her in almost a decade. The first man she’d wanted in as long as she could remember. The first man she’d ever begged. The first man she’d liked like this in what she was fairly certain was forever.
Zoe didn’t know why she was surprised that Jason Treffen should be hanging over this moment—literally. What was surprising was that she’d let herself forget that she knew exactly who Hunter was. That she always had.
“Tell me,” Hunter said quietly. Intently. With some kind of reined-in ferocity that made the air feel heavy and unwieldy all around them. “How do you know Sarah?”
Maybe he knew, too. Maybe he’d always known, just as she had.
Maybe this was nothing more than another sick game.
But she was tired of everyone else winning. She was tired of hiding, no matter what had spurred her out into the light. She was tired of Jason fucking Treffen and the damage he did.
“I was there.”
Zoe knew she was speaking only when she saw him react to her voice, jerking up and onto his feet as if she’d hauled off and hit him. But it was as though she’d vanished inside herself. Disappeared into that far-off safe space she hadn’t had to access in a very long time. She could see how tense he was then and that terrible darkness on his face, but she actually smiled, because she’d gone completely and utterly numb, and it was better. Much better.
“I remember you, Hunter.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
There was a dark torment in his gaze, in the odd tautness in his body, in the way he started to reach for her, then stopped.
Of course he stopped. She suspected he knew exactly what she was going to say. And who wanted to touch someone like that? She couldn’t blame him.
It was lucky she’d disappeared inside herself, because even that didn’t hurt.
“Sarah and I met at orientation at Treffen, Smith, and Howell when we still thought we were going to be legal assistants,” Zoe said in that remote and chilly way, as if she wasn’t really talking about herself. And in so many ways, she wasn’t. That Zoe had died a long time ago. “She wanted to be a judge someday. I wanted to say clever things in court. We ate lunch together every day, though as time passed, we talked less. That last week we just sat there, because what was there to say?” To his credit, he didn’t look away. But then, maybe he already knew all of this. “She wasn’t the only one who killed herself, you know. She just did it spectacularly.”
He said something and it took her a moment to realize it was her name.
“She always said you were her boyfriend,” Zoe said, because she didn’t care what he said or even how he said it. As if it was painful. “It didn’t occur to me until later that you were already very wealthy at twenty-three. Were you really her boyfriend? Or did you pay more so she’d act like it?”
Hunter went pale, and it was like a kick to the belly that some part of her responded to that, hurt for him.
“I did not pay Sarah to do anything,” he said, in a stranger’s voice. As if he wanted to be pissed she’d suggested it, but it hurt too much.
“Did he blackmail you?” she asked coolly, telling herself none of the rest of it mattered. And it didn’t. He didn’t. He was useful, nothing more. “Because that’s what he does. It’s not enough to run escorts out of a fancy law firm. Not for a saint like Jason Treffen.”
“I didn’t pay Sarah.” Still that dark, awful tone in his voice. “I didn’t pay anyone.”
“I assumed you got fired from your football team because you stopped paying him off.” Zoe held his gaze, and it wasn’t bravado that moved in her then. It was much heavier than that. Much more poisonous. “But that only works if you were one of his johns. If you still are.”
“No.” His voice was low and altered, as if he was forcing it out through steel wool and it was scraping deep marks into him along the way. “That was all me. I was expelled from the NFL purely because I’m an asshole.”
Jason Treffen hung on the wall on the television screen behind him, framing Hunter the way he’d framed Zoe’s life, and she wished she could summon up the anger that usually fed her—the deep, abiding fury that had fueled her all these years. Jason laughed, Jason flirted with the two morning show hosts, Jason played his fucking part the way he always did, and she wished she had access to the rage that had kept her warm and safe and alive this past decade.
But she felt that weight on her chest, pressing behind her eyes, and she felt nothing but sad. So terribly sad she thought it might warp her. Change her. Disfigure her down into her bones, so deep and so permanent that she’d never walk the same way again.
There was always a price. For everything. She knew that better than anyone.
Zoe supposed she shouldn’t be so surprised that after all this time, after all the ways she’d paid and paid, it could still hurt like this.
And yet there it was, tearing her up as if she hadn’t been quite as ruined as she’d thought. As if there was always something new that could be leveled. Razed. Turned to dust.
“Aren’t we a pretty pair,” she said, all of that darkness in her voice, all these years of despair and denial and revenge fantasies to ease the terrible cost of it all.
Everything she’d done. Everything she’d lost. All the girls Jason had ruined. All the ways she was ruined herself. All of it. Because that was all she had left.
Maybe Jason had been right a long time ago, and what he’d made her was all she’d ever be. Maybe she should have surrendered to that a long time ago, the way so many of the others had. The way Sarah had.
Maybe she should have given up. It would have been easier.
She smiled at Hunter, and told herself
this was funny. “You’re not a john, but at least you get to be an asshole. I’m afraid I’m just another whore.”
Chapter Eight
He’d known.
On some level, Hunter was aware, he’d suspected this. Why else would she have thrown Sarah’s name in his face that first morning?
He’d known, but he hadn’t wanted to know. The story of his fucking life, and yet this wasn’t the time to dive back into the comfortable swamp of his own self-pity. Not when she’d gone too cold, too frigid. And it wasn’t that clever, deliberate coolness he’d found he couldn’t get enough of, that he only wanted to bask in. It was as though the Zoe he’d known had disappeared beneath a long winter’s deposit of ice, and he could hardly bear it.
He hated it. He wouldn’t allow it. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep from reaching out to her, and he drew on all his years of tense football games and tough plays to calm himself down. To focus. This wasn’t about him, it was about Zoe. His beautiful, brave, tough Zoe, who he refused to let disappear into that darkness he could see had its hooks in her. Deep.
“This is why you wanted me,” he said, straining with the effort to keep from shouting. To keep all that fury that rolled inside him banked and controlled, because he didn’t want to aim it at her. “My connection to Sarah.” He jerked his head at the television screen. “To that piece of shit.”
“You’re the key to my revenge,” she agreed. But her voice was frozen. Too sharp and mocking. It was like a slap.
He didn’t want to slap back, he wanted to soothe her, hold her, help her—but he knew she’d never let that happen. She’d never let him close to her again without a fight.
Hunter could always fight. He was good at it.
“Some revenge,” he said. “So enthusiastically sleeping with a man you think prefers the company of call girls. How does that hurt Jason, exactly?”
“That was purely to manipulate you.” A quirk of her dark brows. “Especially the enthusiasm.”
He laughed, though he couldn’t quite pull it off. “I appreciate you suffering through it. Very thoughtful. But you probably should have come up with a better morning-after act.”
There was a flicker of something in her too-dark eyes then, and he thought he might have broken through, but then she only smiled that same empty smile.
“I don’t think I have to manipulate this situation any further,” she said calmly. Too calmly, as if he hadn’t been there in that bed. As if he didn’t know there hadn’t been a shred of calculation in her all night long. “You’re either going to help me because Jason Treffen is responsible for your girlfriend’s death, or because you know I’m aware that you’re one of his very special clients and you wouldn’t want that getting out. It doesn’t matter which.”
“Of course it matters.” That came out harsher than it should have, revealing him too starkly, and her head jerked back as if he’d hit her. Damn it. “I told you I was never his client. Not like that.” He studied her for a taut breath, then another. “Are you fighting all the ghosts in the room or are you fighting me? I can’t tell.”
“I can’t really see the difference.”
“Fight me, Zoe. You can actually hit me. Because I’m standing right here.”
She moved then, and he thought it was a small sort of victory, even when all she did was head to the far end of the sectional and sit down, lounging back as if she’d never been more at her ease. Never more calm.
Meanwhile, he thought his chest might crack wide open. He thought this might actually kill him. Especially when she leveled that unfriendly look at him, as though after all of this, he was the enemy.
“I’m not fighting,” she said, in a tone that suggested he was a raving lunatic.
Hunter rubbed his hands over his face, then sat down, too, not far from her but certainly not as close as he would have liked. There was too much boiling inside him, too big and too dangerous, and all of it so painful and unbalanced and extreme he didn’t know what to do with any of it.
“Of course you’re not,” he muttered, and instead of indulging his usual fight-or-fuck response to adversity the way he’d have preferred, he just looked at her. “Why don’t you tell me this plan of yours? I think it’s time for the great unveiling, don’t you?”
She was quiet for a moment, and Hunter was too aware of the way his heart pounded so damned hard, how his breath felt caught in his chest. Loud. Constrained. Zoe shifted slightly where she sat, and he wanted it to be nerves. He wanted her to feel some of what he did.
“The plan is that you expose Jason Treffen. Show the world who he really is.” She gave him that small, sharp smile again, still lacking the bite and sparkle of the Zoe he knew. “Right before his big interview that will cement him in the public imagination as a saint forevermore.”
“Why would anyone listen to me?” He was proud of his calm, reasonable tone. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but I’m not exactly considered the poster boy for truth and justice these days.”
“That’s why you’re perfect.” She seemed to relax slightly as she ticked off his selling points on her fingers, one after the next. “Your reputation is already shot, so it’s not as if Jason can threaten you with the loss of it. You’re hated, in fact, so what will it matter if people hate you more? But you also have intimate knowledge of the man going back more than a decade, which means that if you speak out long enough and loud enough—and into the right ears, which is where I come in—you’ll eventually be heard.” She smiled again. “And meanwhile, the fact that you’ve spent all this time quietly doing good works in the wake of your expulsion from the NFL without attempting to benefit personally from any of it will, of course, play heavily in your favor.”
“And here I was beginning to think you were making it up as you went along.”
She shrugged. “I told you I knew what I was doing.”
But he couldn’t help thinking about how she’d have said that last part if she wasn’t as switched off and distant as she was now, and it thudded inside him, the loss of her sharp, knowing smirk. Of that amused glint in her cool gray gaze.
He wanted her back.
“I was hoping you were going to these lengths because you had designs on my fine body. It happens. Sometimes, as you saw, it even happens at the gym. Or in libraries.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me before,” she said, much too softly, her gaze dark and tormented on his. “I wasn’t being metaphoric. I was an escort. I sold myself. To men. For money.” Each sentence was a short, harsh bullet. “Why would you keep flirting with me now? This is usually where I get paid. That’s what whore means.”
And Hunter recognized what he saw in her, then. What she was doing.
That almost-warm, near-laughter in her voice, encouraging him to join in the horrible joke. That sharp, pointed boldness, throwing the worst thing she could think of out on the table like that. And all of that terrible anguish beneath.
Oh, yes. He knew this routine. So well he could taste it like bile in his own throat.
He knew terrible guilt when he saw it. He knew self-loathing and that deep, debilitating shame. He knew this game. He’d been playing it for years, and with far less reason.
But he also knew Zoe.
“How do you want to be paid?” he asked lazily, and she jerked against the sofa, her breath leaving her in an audible rush. “Cash? Credit card? An exchange of gifts and services?”
She looked as if he’d hit her again, and harder this time. “Very funny.”
“Let’s be clear, Zoe. I don’t think anything that’s happened since you came downstairs this morning is funny. Not in the least. I asked you a question.”
“About payment.” She’d gone still. Pale.
He thought that was probably progress, though it felt like broken glass inside him, shattering over and over again.
“Sure.” He held her gaze, hard. Until she let out a long, shaky breath, temper and agony, and he felt it like nails across his chest. “N
ame your price.”
“Stop.” Small, but certain.
“You seem to want to throw what happened to you in my face, so let’s do this. Let’s make it as awful as possible. Name a price. You know I can pay it. I’m richer than God.”
“Of course you’re making this about you. That’s what men like you—”
“There are no men like me,” he bit off, all the violence he was holding in check in his voice then. “Not for you. Not now. Name your price.”
“Go to hell!” she threw at him.
She surged to her feet in a blind explosion, but he’d expected that. Wanted it. He met her, feeling a kind of deep satisfaction when she swung at him. He felt her fists land on him, harder than he’d anticipated, and he let her do it. He didn’t even raise his own arms in defense.
“Hit me harder,” he told her gruffly, watching that dark light in her eyes, that grim cast over her face. “Make it hurt, Zoe, or what’s the point?”
She swayed on her feet, her breath coming in harsh pants, but the gray eyes that met his were a wild winter storm. The dead thing behind them was gone, and though he knew that was good, he also knew it must hurt. And still she held her fists in front of her like weapons, as if she had no idea how small they were. Or as if it didn’t matter, because she’d fight anyway.
His Zoe. Completely incapable of surrender.
“Hurt me,” he said again, more intently. “Don’t you know how this works? Shit always rolls downhill. So consider this an incline.”
She was still breathing too hard. She looked forlorn and terrified and fierce all at once, and he knew that if he tried to touch her she’d come straight out of her skin. He concentrated on the faint sting from the blows she’d landed on his chest, each one proof she wasn’t as lost as she looked. She hadn’t disappeared beneath that ice. She was still right here, no matter how much it hurt her. Or him.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she gritted out after a long moment, as if the words were torn from her throat.