The Deception series boxset: FaCade, Cadence, Beneath Innocence (27 page)

“Holy shit, look at that.” All heads spun to look in the direction his eyes were fixed on. My breath left me. Star. As beautiful as I remembered. Her hair was thick and hung in layers down her back, her trim physique that was toned in the right places made my dick awaken.

“Oh yeah, I forgot she comes here when in town.” That little prick. “I’d pay anything to watch her though a live feed.” He grunted. “Wasn’t she the one who screwed you over?”

The table had grown eerily silent as my temper simmered on the edge of boiling over. How the hell did he know about her?

All eyes went to me as I stood and walked towards her. It was her. In the flesh. Her scent engulfed me. I dragged in some air to prepare myself. Grabbing her arm, I spun her to face me. She hadn’t changed. The girl I fell in love with the girl who hardened my heart to impenetrable rock stared back at me. She was so close I could taste the breath that left her in a gasp. Her mouth dropped open, then smiled, then dropped back open. Her huge wide eyes formed tears, making her striking green irises glisten as she stared at me.

My hand slid down her arm to her hand. I shook when my finger brushed over a diamond on her ring finger. My eyes trailed the path my hand took and fell to her engagement ring. She snatched her hand back, drawing my eyes back to hers.

“Is it him?” I growled.

Her eyes squinted and her chest stuttered with her short, sharp breaths. “Dante?...

“Is it him?”

“You abandoned me,” she whispered. To hear her soft voice again caused my heart to clench, but fury pushed it back as the image of when I had last seen her came tumbling back in, solidifying the ice once more.

“Because you’re a whore!” I spat.

She inhaled, her eyes blinking and releasing the tears that had pooled in them. Her hand reared back and connected with my cheek before I could react or stop it.

She stormed from the restaurant, her chin as high as her defenses.

You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone had ceased eating; hell they’d even ceased breathing.

Turning back to our table, ten angry, judgmental eyes seared me. I let a woman,
that fucking woman,
humiliate me, making me look weak in their eyes. They saw women as objects beneath them.

I waltzed towards them, emanating confidence and power, and sat. Raising my glass, I lifted it in the air and grinned. “A toast. We have our trial run target gentlemen.” I smirked.

Hunter had used his contacts to gather every single detail about the life of Faye Avery, Hollywood Queen, from birth up to the day in the restaurant. It was incredible that he had got every single detail, even her confidential medical records.

It was those I was reading through when my heart stopped. Flicking over the form, my eyes scanning but only registering certain parts.

Name - Faye Avery

Age – Seventeen

Known allergies – Penicillin

Termination – One foetus

Gestation - Eight weeks, three days

Method – Mifepristone

I couldn’t breathe, my eyes blurring from staring at the same fact over and over

Seventeen! She was with me then. Did she kill my baby?

A month later, Hunter found a weakness in her staff. The assistant, Theo. Money hungry and power hungry. He would set up a trip for her and we would step in and take her. We would make her disappear, and I knew what method we would use. A plane crash. Poetic.

It had been so easy. Theo drugged her drink with a sleeping pill on the private plane he claimed to have hired for her. The plan went off without a hitch. The plane landed on private property, we torched it and we took her away. Once I had her in my arms she awoke from her slumber, her face pinching in confusion. My palm wrapped around her throat. “The baby you killed, was it mine?” Her eyes expanded to huge round orbs. “Answer me,” I growled, tightening my hold.

Tears welled and dropped from her eyes as she whispered though the strain. “Yes.”

That was all I needed. I injected her with more sedative and planned her demise.

Present

Everything was coming to a head, I could feel the end game approaching. I had stopped slipping the drug into her food over two weeks ago. Her memories would filter back in slowly but soon the truth would come crashing into her. I still loved her. I always would and I refused to let her go. This was their punishment for betraying me.

She stole my chance of becoming a father, all for what? So she could fuck around and still keep me on her leash and have both?

It wasn’t something I had ever thought about, being a parent, but I wasn’t given a choice. She killed something I put inside her, something created through the love I had for her then.

I would make her rectify everything she stole. He would feel the pain I felt.

I watched her run through the house and out the front door. Switching to the outdoor cameras, my heart flickered in my chest at her race towards the dock, her dainty hand holding over her heart.

She didn’t know I had come home or that I had cameras in all the bathrooms of the house. So when she watched the pregnancy stick turn positive and spoke the words, “I’m pregnant,” I heard and saw everything.

The end game had worked to perfection.

I stood when I saw a boat approach with a man holding up a huge camera.

I WAS SO IN MY own head I didn’t hear the boat or the shouting until a flashing camera was in my face.

“Faye! Faye! Can you tell us why you let the world believe you died when your plane went down?”

What? The person barking stupid questions at me shoved a paper into my hands.

I couldn’t read anymore. It was like being hit with a tidal wave that destroyed the wall that was put up to hide my memories. Everything came flooding back into me. My lungs squeaked when the visions ploughed into my brain. It was like someone had clicked their fingers and my life hit me with the force of a train wreck. My knees buckled as my legs gave way and I fell to the floor, everything suddenly making perfect sense… perfect horrifying sense.

I was aware of Malik man-handling the guy asking questions as a fury found me and I pushed myself back upright, adrenaline forcing strength to overpower my weakened body.

“We were tipped off by a local who delivers mail here via speedboat.” The guy was answering Malik’s questioning but my feet started moving, one in front of the other, until I stood in front of Dante who was blocking the entrance to our… no not our, HIS house.

“Why Dante?” I choked out. “Oh God, why did you do this to me?”

His face was stoic like he wasn’t human. How could he do this to me? I loved him. When we were younger I thought he was my soul mate and would have given him anything. I aborted my child so he wouldn’t find out and ruin his future. He would have stayed and dropped out of college to work a shit job so he could support me and I couldn’t do that to him. Dante’s were rare in this world and I recognized his greatness.

“I saw you!” My head tipped up to his, his angry eyes holding my confused ones. “I didn’t leave. I came to your house and saw you leave with him. You went to a motel and stayed in there all night with him. How long were you fucking him behind my back?”

What? Oh my God.

My head shook as I answered him, completely defeated. “I had to take these pills,” I said. “They force an abortion to happen. You get really sick and I needed someone with me. I couldn’t do it at my house; you know what my mom was like.”
Is like.
She wasn’t dead. He had lied about that too.

He looked pale.

“I would never cheat on anyone Dante, and God, I loved you so fiercely. I died the day they told me your plane went down. I was never the same and when we got news you were never on the plane, I have never felt more joy in my life but then the fact you didn’t contact me broke me all over again. I was clueless to why you abandoned me. I thought you liked your new life and had maybe met someone else.”

A choked sob ripped from me as tears cascaded down my face, their torrent tearing my soul out of my body with them. “Do you know what that does to a soul that’s so in love and attached to another? To endure pain like that was truly unbearable. No one could drag me from the depression. Then months passed, a year, and I relearnt how to be me again. To breathe for me, to wake up and know I was alone and I needed to keep living.”

“But you’re with him!” he screamed at me, making me flinch and step back.

“Three years later, Dante!” I screamed back and hammered my fists at his chest. “What have you done? What did you turn me into?”

My sobs turned to frantic wails when the reality of everything I had become settled in my chest. I had betrayed my real fiancé, the man I was crazy about. He had saved me and reassembled the damaged shadow of the girl that was left after Dante. He rebuilt me piece by piece, by letting me heal myself, by showing me I was worthy of living a good life, and that I had something to offer the world. That I was still loved and still valued and needed. Now I was disgusting and ruined. He would never forgive me for becoming what I was now.

My legs gave out, my body colliding with a crash on the concrete beneath me. How could Dante turn into this? He was sick, cruel to an unimaginable degree. He kidnapped me, he manipulated me, lied, betrayed…ruined me. How did he get away with this?

Dante’s shadow fell over me. “You belong to me.”

A hysterical laugh bubbled up and ripped from my lips. “I belong to him and I will go to him.” Even if he turned me away, I still needed to go to him. He was where I belonged.

Anger coated me in its venom as it dripped from Dante’s demeanor. “You belong to me and you are staying here through choice!”

My eyes sprung to his. Was he insane?

“You will tell him and everyone else you have been away on a secret getaway to marry your lover. You had no idea of the media storm.”

He was certifiable. Freaking crazy son of a bitch!

“Screw you!” I spat.

He dropped on his haunches, gripping my jaw with his fingers, and lifted my face to his. “I have everything on tape, Star.”

My stomach vaulted, threatening to expel the contents.

“You begging me to fuck you in the cell. Every depraved act inside the house. Your pleasure from all the dirty things you let me, hell, begged me to do to you. Malik watching… seeing your pussy on full view.”

The bile burned my throat. The tears blinded my vision. The frantic pound of my blood made me lightheaded.

“I’ll leak everything first to him, and then to the media.”

“Why do you hate me?” I sobbed. I was dizzy and on the verge of passing out. The torrent of memories, the truth of everything was too overwhelming, and the loss and ache from what I knew I could never have back was unbearable.

“We will go through with the wedding and then you’ll give me the child you should have given me years ago.”

My breath left me, along with a long high-pitched sound. I was pregnant. Did he know? Did he plan that?

“I have cameras everywhere, Star… even in the toilets.”

Star
… that had been his pet name for me. No one called me Star any more.

I was drowning in despair, my heart bleeding… crying for its mate… Cade.