I couldn’t hold it back.
The anger that bottled in my stomach and spread out to infect my chest where it became a lash from my tongue.
She was leaving me.
She was leaving me.
Pain made a thousand stab wounds in her expression.
In the barest flash of time, she stared at me with a torment so deep I wondered if she could meet me at mine.
My spirit screamed.
Then she ripped her attention away, taking the oxygen from the air when she did.
The atmosphere darkened, clouded and dimmed, and her breaths turned short and uneven.
Fuck.
I was such a prick, but I felt myself unraveling.
Losing control.
Aster Rose was driving me to the point of insanity.
The whole goddamn problem was I didn’t know how to stop myself when it came to her.
She didn’t budge when I shut the door, didn’t move when I rounded the front of my car to the door that remained open. I went to slide in, only I got snagged on a rush of scalding hatred that blistered through the frozen air.
I looked up to catch the figure staring out from behind a drape in a window four stories up.
I cracked him the biggest grin.
Jarek looked like he wanted to bust through the glass to get to me.
Fucker.
I hoped he did.
I slipped onto the heated seat, shifted into gear, and gunned the accelerator. My Maserati skidded out of the drive and onto the main road.
Aster stared out the passenger window, so still it would be easy to miss the way every cell in her body oozed with hurt.
I didn’t.
I could feel it.
Sense it.
The way I’d always been able to do.
The knot in her throat. The way her shoulders hitched. The emotion that wept even though she tried to hold it like a secret.
Regret tightened my chest.
I was pretty sure my faulty plan had been too much for her.
I was thinking right then it’d been too much for me, too.