Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1) - Aly Martinez Page 0,2

majority of his face. How he’d gotten there, I would never know.

I shook my head so fast that it was almost as if it were vibrating.

His eyes bulged. “Listen to me, kid. He’s pacing a pattern. Right now, he’s down near the froyo place. After he makes his next pass, we’ll have about sixty seconds to get over to the Pizza Crust. They have a door in the back we can escape through, but you gotta stick with me.”

I blinked at him. Who was this boy? He was young but older than I was. And while he wasn’t big and muscled like the tattooed guy, he was tall and could probably put up a fight.

“Did you hear me?” he asked when I didn’t reply. “When I say go, you stay low and head behind the counter at the Pizza Crust. Okay?”

“He…he’ll shoot us,” I stammered out.

“That’s why we have to be fast.” He lifted his head and glanced around. “Shit,” he muttered, putting his cheek back to the tile and closing his eyes.

I stared at his long, fluttering lashes for several seconds, debating if I was seriously going to trust this kid. I didn’t know him any better than I knew the shooter. But he was all I had. Help in any form, even that of a lanky teenage boy, was better than nothing.

His eyes were still closed, his breathing shallow and his body completely still, when he suddenly reached out and used two fingers to close my lids.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered so quietly that, had he not been mere inches away, I wouldn’t have heard him.

And for the first time since I’d seen my father collapse, I felt a spark of hope that maybe it would be okay.

Flattening my palm against the cool tile, I slid my hand over until I found the tips of his fingers. The footsteps were getting closer, but that boy didn’t delay in moving his index finger to rest on top of mine.

It was such a small gesture, but it brought tears to my eyes.

For a terrified little girl, playing dead to hide from a madman, it was sweetest thing he could have done.

With nothing more than the pad of his finger resting on mine, I wasn’t alone anymore.

I didn’t know who he was or where he’d come from, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that when he said go, I was going with him.

CAVEN

Fourteen years later…

“I wish I had more words. Well, honestly, I wish Ian had words. But, somehow, he always finds the back of the room.”

“It’s not by accident!” he yelled, causing everyone to laugh.

“I guess the only thing left to say is thank you. To all of you who helped us get here. And especially to all of those who doubted we ever would.” Smiling, I lifted the bottle in the air. “To Kaleidoscope!”

The cork on the champagne sprang free, spilling bubbles all over my hardwood floors. A dozen of my friends, their dates, and a few assholes I pretended to like cheered as I tipped the seven-hundred-dollar bottle up for a sip before wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my blue button-down.

“Easy there, or you’ll be worthless tonight,” Veronica purred as she sidled up beside me, pressing her thin body and huge breasts against my side. Her golden-blond hair fell like silk over her bare shoulders, and her tight, strapless, red dress left little to the imagination.

However, after the way she’d been eye-fucking me all night, I didn’t suspect she wanted me to use my imagination at all.

Smirking, I slid my free arm around her waist. We’d been playing the forbidden cat-and-mouse game for months. Her throwing herself at me. Me pretending that I didn’t want to fuck her senseless. But, with the deal closed and the money in the bank, I was officially a free man. Well, not that I hadn’t been a free man before. I’d been blissfully single for the majority of my life. But since we’d met three months earlier, Veronica had been off-limits. She was the personal assistant to Stan Gotham—billionaire owner of tech giant Copper Wire. Which happened to be the computer company that had just purchased my college start-up for six-hundred-eighty-six million dollars.

Hold on. Let me repeat that.

Six hundred.

Eighty-six.

Million.

Dollars.

No woman in the world was worth screwing up that kind of deal.

Eight years earlier, when I’d started Kaleidoscope with my best friend, Ian Villa, we couldn’t even get his parents to invest in our facial recognition