Mirage - Alice Tribue Page 0,65
to him. I honestly don’t want to look at him because looking at the face that I loved… that I love, the same face that betrayed me, is too painful.
“I need you to look at me, Tori.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to.”
“Please,” he asks quietly, and I let out a sigh because even now he has power over me, even though I don’t want to comply with his request.
I take one look at him and all of the anger is gone, replaced now with hurt. I don’t see the man who was placed in my life in an attempt to uncover my double life, I see the man who I fell in love with. I hate everything about this—I hate what he did, how this turned out, and I hate how when I look at him, all I want to do is break down and cry. So, I fight the urge, but it’s a useless battle. The tears that are threatening to break free spill over, and I let them go. I cry for everything that I’ve just lost and the life I’m about to lose—how I came so close to starting a new chapter, only to have it erased in the blink of an eye. I cry for how I fell in love with the perfectly imperfect man and how even now I love him more than I hate him.
He takes a step toward me, and I take one back.
He appears to be in as much pain as I’m in when he looks at me. “Please don’t cry.”
How could I not cry? How could I not feel this, want to confront it, confront him? And so I do the only thing I can think to do. I throw out my accusations, hoping that his explanation is worth the time it took for him to break me.
“How could you be so cruel? How could you do that to me? Your job was to uncover evidence about me, not seduce me, not fuck me and make me fall in love with you.”
“Yeah,” he agrees with a nod. “And God only knows I tried. I tried to keep you at arms’ length, but that connection you felt… I felt that, too. It got to the point where I just couldn’t help it. I told myself just once, just one time, but once I had you, there was no way I could stop.”
I run my hands up and down my face, suddenly feeling exhausted.
“What does that even mean?”
He disappears into his bathroom and appears again moments later having produced a tissue. He hands it to me and tells me to sit down. I do as he says because, at this point, the quicker I comply, the quicker I can get this over with.
“Let me start from the beginning. Months ago, a known prostitute by the name of Kimberly Lewis was picked up for drug possession. During her questioning, she started talking, talking about a Madam, a woman who fired her, forced her into this life on the street. She implicated you, Victoria. She told the cops all about you.”
“I fired her because she refused to get help; she refused to go to rehab.”
“Well, after she made her statement… That’s when vice was brought in.”
“You.”
“Yes, me. I was just supposed to get close to you, offer you security services, infiltrate your life that way, but after meeting you… I don’t know, you intrigued the fuck out of me. You weren’t at all what I was expecting, not at all, so I thought I’d take you out one or two times, feel you out, but the more time we spent together, the more I wanted to spend with you.”
“You put Rick in my office; you told me that he was a security guard.”
“He’s a detective, too,” he says, confirming my suspicions. “When I wasn’t getting anywhere, it was decided that we needed someone else on the inside, and that’s the only way I knew how to make that happen.”
“Of course.”
“You are the smartest woman I know though because you never let him anywhere near your business, not even once. You kept him confined to front office duty; he was a glorified doorman. You made him absolutely miserable by the way; he was bored out of his mind.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, let me take a minute to feel bad for him.”
His lips tip up in a half smile.
“Anyway, when you and I… when we had sex, I crossed a line.”
“What do you mean?”
“Intimate relationships with