Fraud (Antihero Inferno #2) - Lily White Page 0,59
take it as a hint.
I walk to the bedroom door and see another note in the hallway.
Walk this way.
Following that, I come to another note.
Keep going.
This is a bit ridiculous. He could have shown me to a different room. I come to another note.
Almost there. A few more steps.
Another note is a few feet away.
Turn left.
Doing as I’m told, I turn and push a door open into a large guest bedroom.
My bags are stacked in the center of it.
All seventeen of them.
Walking up to them, I find another note on top.
I pick it up and laugh.
This is your room for the night. Stay here. If you try anything stupid, you’ll live to regret it.
Gabriel
The storm continues late into the night, the constant flash of lightning illuminating the skies as close thunder shakes the walls around me.
After getting a shower and thawing myself out, I spend the next few hours staring out the large window in my bedroom, my eyes focused on the trees in the distance while the house is so quiet you can hear a pin drop.
The silence doesn’t bother me, and given that Ivy is here, I prefer it. There’s no possible way to lock her in her room, although I’d given it some thought. Tying her down would probably be a little over the top considering I just finished fucking her on the hood of my car as an affront to the world around us.
It was stupid of me to have sex with her. That wasn’t the plan, and the fact that we ended up naked beneath a fucking lightning storm on top of a car only proves we’re not capable of rational thought when we’re together.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Ivy mentioned going inside, but I was too focused on finishing something I’d started years ago to worry about the suggestion.
Unfortunately, my attraction to her is undeniable. It’s also unfortunate that with the attraction comes memory, and with that memory comes a side to myself that I’d rather nobody know.
Obviously, the guys know the truth because they have the same issues themselves, but nobody on the outside knows.
Nobody except Ivy.
It’s been this way since the beginning, and if I believed in things like destiny, I would assume fate took two of the most fucked up strings she could find and tied them together at the worst point possible.
The day I met Ivy was the same day I was used to teach Tanner to walk the line.
I hadn’t lied to Luca when I told her that story, hadn’t fudged the truth to make it more digestible. I was used as an example of how all of us would obey, and then I was driven to another house and walked out to keep Ivy company while our fathers were conducting business.
Back then, Ivy’s father was still an attorney, his pockets lined by questionable cash. He wasn’t yet in the political spotlight where he had to better hide his true connection to some of our families.
Can you imagine what it’s like to be bruised and bloodied only to be shoved in front of another person whose life is lived on a cushioned pedestal?
There she was, the spoiled princess, in her pretty blue dress with her white hair tied back in ribbons and two popsicles in her hand.
And there I was, the broken prince, with a busted lip and no outlet for my anger.
Ivy saw the truth that day.
I hated her immediately.
She became my outlet.
Not that she was a victim from that day forward. Ivy gives as good as she gets, which is why this war has lasted so long.
The thing with opponents is that, while you hate them for the competition they become, you also respect them for the same thing. There is no competition if a person is weaker than you in any way, but that could never be said about Ivy.
Of course it would be her that night at the party. Our dads were pissed off that we’d bucked the system again, and they’d used me to get a message across.
What Ivy saw wasn’t a regular occurrence, only one that happened when we didn’t immediately bow to their demands and march to their orders.
For weeks after that, I’d believed Ivy had started the fire at my house. I’d struck out as a result. Our games became crueler, and when the investigative report came back that lightning had been the cause, it was too late by that point to stop what I’d started.