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“I’ll buy you an island for the damn mutts if that’s what it takes,” he says. “Just get in the car.”
I almost laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s obscene.
He’s standing there with blood on his shirt, after sending another man to sleep with me, after trying to strip me of everything, and he still thinks there’s a price that will make me climb into his car.
“I don’t care if I have to start over with nothing,” I say. “I will never come home to you.”
Maverick just looks at me, confused, as if I’ve answered in a language he doesn’t speak.
I turn to Levi.
Maverick’s blood is still on his knuckles, and there’s something raw and desperate in his eyes.
Things start sliding into place all at once. The wine bar. Him moving in next door. The way he kept appearing. The knife as a gift. The knife he pulled on my teacher.
There’s too much to understand. Too much to survive all at once. Every moment we’ve ever shared is shifting in my mind, turning ugly under the weight of what he really is.
I need to hear him say it.
Here. Now. With Maverick standing only feet away.
Because Maverick knows the truth. Whatever Levi says in front of him has to be real. No careful version. No half-confession. No leaving out the parts that make it worse.
I need the words out in the open where Levi can’t soften them and I can’t go home later and convince myself I misunderstood.
I steel myself.
“You work with Drew?”
“I can explain—”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“As a hitman?”
The word looks like it hurts him, but I don’t care. Not right now.
“It’s not like—”
“Yes or no,” I say, firmer this time.
His throat works. “Yes.”
“And my husband hired you to sleep with me?”
Levi goes very still.
“Say it.”
“Yes. But I didn’t give him what he wanted,” he says quickly. “I didn’t tell him shit. Things changed, Carmen. I was going to tell you.”
I stare at him.
Things changed.
As if that makes any part of this better. As if the lie becomes smaller because he decided to develop a conscience somewhere in the middle of trying to destroy me.
