she crossed her arms over her chest. “I look exactly like her, don’t I.”
Taking a deep breath, he nodded once.
There was a long pause. And then she walked off some distance down the corridor. As she strode away, he wondered if he shouldn’t have lied about the appearance part. But that was a pussy move. She deserved the truth, and he deserved her anger.
Abruptly, she halted. Pivoted around to him. Came back.
“You said you lived with the King, right?” When he nodded again, she looked away. Looked back. “So the Black Dagger Brotherhood is his personal guard, correct. So that male I waited on—Rhage—with his shellan, they know you, right? Because they live there, too.” He nodded again, aware of exactly where this was going. “So they knew her. Didn’t they.”
When he nodded once more, she started pacing again. “And that’s why they did the double take when I went to wait on their table. And that’s why your brother has always been weird around me. It’s why the two of you fought last night—and it’s why Xhex, your head of security at the club, also stared at me like that. They all saw it. They all saw what you did in me. Which was someone else.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I’m so sorry—”
She put her hand up. “Stop. Just… stop with that right now.”
“I didn’t mean—”
Jacking forward on her hips, she narrowed her eyes on him. “You didn’t mean to use me? Explain to me exactly how that argument works. How you somehow didn’t intend to substitute me for your dead mate when I apparently look like the female. Explain to me how, when you were fucking me, you didn’t think of her the whole time.” When he went to say something, she talked right over him. “What you really need to tell me is how the hell you didn’t call me by her—”
Therese stopped. Then massaged her temples like she had a headache. “You never used my name, actually. Did you. You never said my name when we were intimate. God, I didn’t even see it. I didn’t even—the feeding.” As the color ran out of her face and she covered her mouth like she was sick to her stomach, he felt like he’d been kneed in the balls. “You didn’t take my vein, even though you were starved, because you didn’t want to know my blood tasted different. You didn’t want anything to break the fantasy, to remind you I wasn’t her.”
As Trez watched the depth of his betrayal sink in for her, he wanted to take it all back. The whole thing, from that first night when he had tried to get her to take him to Havers to what they had done in the passageway at the club to everything that had happened at the little house. He wanted to spare her everything she was feeling now.
But to do that, he would have had to have listened to his brother’s advice.
The reality of how wrong Trez had been, for some very right reasons, was a new low for him. And considering where he had started out from? That was saying something.
Therese took a deep breath. “I need to go now. And I need you to never seek me out again. Tell your brother I’m quitting without notice—something tells me he’s going to understand exactly why—”
“Therese—”
“No!” she barked as she stamped her foot.
Then she clapped her hand over her mouth again as if she were stopping herself from either a rant or a crying jag. Or maybe both.
“Just go,” she choked out. “I’ve fallen down a deep hole and I’ve got to start getting out of it right now—”
“I wish I—”
“No,” she countered, “you don’t get to wish anything. You knew what you were doing. You knew exactly what you were doing to me. I don’t give a shit whether you’re grieving or not. It was wrong. This whole… thing was wrong.” Except then she laughed harshly. “But hey, it’s also on me. I didn’t question anything. I didn’t ask why you were pursuing me. I didn’t protect myself. And we never talked about ground rules, or whether we were in a relationship or—for fuck’s sake, we had sex a couple of times. That was it. So I need to grow the hell up.”
She said all that like she was trying to remind herself of the facts. Like she was reframing things—or trying to.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“Okay, you can go screw yourself with that,” she snapped