Everything was thickened.
The air and his words and the severity of his gaze.
Then he pressed his face to the inside of my calf.
I gasped.
“Do you want me to ruin him, Aster? Is that what you want me to do?”
Anxiety clouded the desire. My heart thudded at a furious, wicked beat. “I just want to be free.”
Hatred clawed through his expression. Only part of it was directed at me.
Logan suddenly pushed to his feet.
Menacing.
Beautiful.
Terrifying.
He lifted his hand and touched the necklace I wore, as if the star had branded him, too.
“Do you love him?” His voice dropped low as he shifted his attention to the ring I hated that I wore around my finger.
“No.” I couldn’t stop it from bleeding with pain.
“So you did it for what?” His words became blades.
“You left me without a choice.”
He pressed his face to my neck. I nearly drowned. Fell. Dug my nails into his back.
I forced myself to hold tight to the counter before I let myself go.
“There’s always a choice, Aster.” He pulled back, hurt a whorl that eclipsed the light in his eyes. “There’s always a choice.”
“And you made the wrong one.” I shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have given it to him, but I was swept into his arms before I could think through the implications of what I’d done.
His nose was at my jaw. “Did I?”
I wondered if he didn’t know. If he didn’t understand. Or if the only thing that had really mattered in the end was the greed.
“I hate you. You’d do well not to forget it.” It sounded of pain. A rush of regret. Hurt that slayed.
My arms curled tighter around his neck. “I hate you, too.”
I guessed we were both good at telling each other lies.
Maybe it was the only way either of us would survive this captivity. The only way we’d make it through the torment of wanting something you could never truly have.
Because he could never know what his actions had caused. The dominos that had been set in motion. The promise I’d made the one thing keeping him alive.
He carried me into the main room.
Gretchen looked up from where she was dumping a dustpan of glass into the trash. “See, manners. It isn’t so hard, is it?”
He grunted at her. “Keep it up, Gigi, and your days here are numbered.”