The sound of a glass exploding against the wall was deafening, and it hammered straight into my heart.
I fought to control the violent trembling in my body and half-stumbled toward the rooftop bar. I grabbed a bottle of liquor, tilted my head back, and poured it down my throat. The burn seared through me, and tears streamed down my face as I choked. I never drank. Not a drop, not ever. But in that moment, all I wanted was to drown myself in alcohol until those words stopped echoing in my skull.
So the person who leaked my mother's patents was never Grayson.
It was Samuel. The man who had sworn to avenge my mother. The man who had promised to protect me for the rest of my life.
My mother's sudden death. The brand's catastrophic collapse. All the pain, all the despair — it had all been engineered by the man who slept beside me every night.
No wonder he could always pinpoint the exact solution to every crisis the brand faced. No wonder he knew my mother's patents inside and out. I had been naive enough to believe it was just his brilliance, his dedication.
It never occurred to me that the man who had shared my bed for five years, the man who had given me all my warmth and all my hope, was the very person who murdered my mother.
Five years of tenderness and care. Five years of safety and companionship. All of it was nothing but an elaborate lie he'd woven around me — a guilt-ridden act of atonement to quiet his own conscience.
How pathetic. How utterly absurd.
A tidal wave of hatred and despair surged through my chest, threatening to rip me apart from the inside.
With bloodshot eyes, I pulled out my phone and called his greatest rival — Joshua Cox. The one opponent Samuel could never beat. And as it happened, Joshua owed me a favor.
The moment I hung up, my fingers had barely grazed the glass again when a familiar figure wrapped around me from behind. Samuel, reeking of alcohol, buried his face in the curve of my neck. His warm breath spilled across my skin, and his voice was the same gentle murmur it always was:
"Lois... who were you calling? I've been looking everywhere for you. I missed you so much. Let's go home, okay?"
Every time he got drunk over the years, he would hold me just like this from behind, saying over and over that he missed me, that he loved me.
But now, his tenderness made my skin crawl. It cut straight to the bone.