understand why he’d declare himself to me, then spend the whole night with her on his arm. The lowdown, dirty bastard. Coming on to me at his girlfriend’s sister’s wedding, no less. His girlfriend who I worked for. The one he’d cheated on me with.
It was too much to comprehend. Though I couldn’t pretend his honesty hadn’t struck me. I’d replayed the conversation, dissected it. He’d said this wasn’t what he’d signed up for, and I wondered what he’d thought it would be. The entire country could imagine what dating Natasha Felix would be like.
He was obtuse, but he wasn’t so dense to be shocked or surprised by her.
I was bone-tired, worn out from keeping the wall of false indifference up for this long. It was crumbling from exhaustion, bolstered by my will, sandbagged by determination.
A few more hours, I thought, shoveling the last bite of chicken into my mouth, following it with a swipe of my napkin as I chewed.
I figured I had another half hour before I’d start getting the wedding exit together, so I went on the hunt for Kash. I searched the service spaces without finding him, and with my heart in my throat, I rode down to see if the van was still there, relieved to the point of weak knees on finding it there. Back upstairs I went, into the dimly lit ballroom, scanning the faces of guests and searching the fringes for Kash.
But I found Addison instead.
She stood at the edge of the dance floor, arms folded and gaze hard, focused on the guests as they laughed and danced and drank. I didn’t know why I stopped at her side, struck with some familiarity, a still, unexpected moment of equality. For that brief stretch, I saw us from a distance, good and evil, side by side, her darkness to my light. Or perhaps just a couple of stone-cold bitches ready to rip each other’s throats out.
“I have to admit,” she said, watching the crowd jump around to a Calvin Harris song, “you didn’t do a completely terrible job.”
“Look at you, being all sentimental.”
“Don’t get used to it,” she said without making eye contact.
I spent a moment inspecting her profile, finding her cold and beautiful, the exemplification of power. We should have been friends, I realized. We had more in common than not, but somehow, we’d ended up in this vicious circle, one that ended and began with me pinned at the neck.
“Why do you hate me so much?” It was bravery or foolery that inspired me to ask the question I’d never asked before, struck with a brief, regrettable streak of sentimentality myself.
She turned those hard eyes on me, her expression flat and unchanged. But with my question, she opened the veil, answering with all the cold honesty and unshakable pride I knew her to possess. “Because I’ve worked for a decade for what you’ve gotten in half as many years. I’ve worked my whole life for what is handed to you. Because you’re good enough that someday, my position will be threatened by you. And I didn’t come all this way for that.”
The plain fact and blatant threat hung between us. And in my surprise, I made the mistake of reacting, my face softening and opening.
“And that. That look right there. You, Lila, are by the book. You don’t have a knack for deceit, no skill for deception. What you don’t realize is that good guys finish last.”
I schooled my face, nudging my mask back into place. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
“Oh, we will.” Her gaze shifted to the dance floor again. But the honest moment was gone, wiped away with the curl of her level lips. The expression was her equivalent to putting up her dukes. “So, you and the gardener, huh? You said you caught yourself a bigger fish, but I didn’t think you meant physically.”
I looked in the direction she’d indicated, finding Kash standing in the shadows in that glorious suit, watching me with his brow low and lips level. It changed his face, darkened it to menace, the expression foreign to me on a face I’d come to know so well.
I met her eyes again and found challenge there. Challenge and ruin.
“It’s no wonder you wanted to use Longbourne,” she continued, turning to face me fully, shoulders square and eyes black.
“Why does it matter where we get flowers?”
“It doesn’t matter to me beyond the fact that it matters to you.”
A flash of danger, a siren of warning.