I nodded, because I still couldn’t breathe.
“Good. Every day I look at Grayson, at you, and I think of what I broke. You don’t… You probably won’t understand. You’ve probably never broken something so badly that you just stare at the shards and wonder how.”
I broke something priceless. I don’t expect you to believe me, but…I can’t live with myself if it ends this way.
The night I met Grayson and ruined everything, ruined them, flashed into my head.
“I have,” I said hoarsely.
“I want to fix it, Story. I don’t know how, but I need to fix it.”
It’d been months since I’d had any real moment with Grayson, just Grayson. There was so much I needed to tell him. I needed to know how he was doing—really doing. I needed to see him in person. I needed his sideways face.
I would risk anything.
I looked at her. Her hair was down, her curls soft and springy. I bet the guards couldn’t tell the difference between us.
If she gave me her pajamas…
“I shouldn’t ask it of you,” I said.
“Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do anything.”
GRAY
I left West passed out in the sand, a part of me wishing it was colder and he’d freeze to death. I walked past four servants carrying some massive metal abomination for the baby shower in the morning.
It looked like a fucking metal pumpkin.
Forget today’s shitshow, there’s no rest for the wicked. Literally.
On my way up to my wing, I nearly ran right into the triplets. We said nothing to one another. I should have fucking talked to them. How would that go? How did one end an entire lifetime of silence?
Now back in my wing, I couldn’t stop seeing Story’s face.
Her quiet stoicism that all at once enraged and enthralled me. She isn’t fucking fine. I know it, because as Story’s insides were gutted and bled across all of page six, I kept reading her letters.
Dear Atlas,
I miss you fucking me. I miss you going hard. I miss the bruises you’d leave.
You’re so gentle now, but I have a brutal fantasy.
I want you to take it.
I don’t want you to ask for permission.
I want you to rip him out of me. Rip the vines and tear out the thorns until we’re both bloody and there is no trace of him.
What is wrong with me?
I didn’t think anything was wrong with her, but something is definitely wrong with me. If she wasn’t pregnant with my child I would do exactly what she wanted.
I would take it.
I wouldn’t ask.
I’d rip out the piece of West twisting her apart.
A creak sounded and I shoved the phone behind my back, like a peeping Tom caught in the window. No matter how much work my mother put into Crowne Hall, it was still centuries old, the bones creaking.
A shadow stood near my stairs. I stood up, trying to see who had come into my wing. Lottie stood in her white silk pajamas. Why the hell was she here?
“Lottie?”
She was spectral in the moonlight, the salt breeze billowing wild, curly hair—hair like—
“Atlas.”
Forty-Six
STORY
Grayson’s phone slipped from his hand, falling to the hardwood with a clack. He rushed down the stairs to me, pulling me close but stopping so he could study me.
Everything about me.
Then he slammed his lips against mine, his kiss wine, getting my soul drunk.
“How?” he breathed against my lips, but he didn’t let me respond, kissing me again, biting at my bottom lip.
Only after he’d had his fill with me, could I tell him. “Lottie traded places with me.”
He laughed. “This is so fucked up, Snitch.”
“It was the only way I could see you. I needed to see you. I can’t stay past ten…” Past the time Lottie needed to be in her room.
And the time West would most likely expect me.
“Cinderella usually gets until midnight.” He gripped Lottie’s silk and lace pajamas, then ripped them off my body. “There,” he breathed. “That’s fucking better.”
“What am I going to wear?”
“Nothing.” He palmed my stomach in the way that always stole air from my lungs, adding, “You’re going to my bed, but there are too many stairs—”
I laughed. “You and stairs. I can walk up stairs, Grayson.”
“I’m gonna carry you, little wife.”
“I’m too pregnant to threaten with that. You can’t lift me.” I gestured to my stomach.
His eyes darkened, and then he grinned. A full-on Grayson Crowne smile. That was the only warning I got before he swept me off my feet—literally.
I was tucked into a fireman’s carry, wrapping my arms around his neck in seconds.
“I’m too big for this—”
“Shut up, Snitch.”
He carried me up the stairs and to his bed effortlessly. When he set me on the mattress, his whole face changed. I swallowed, hot and cold and achy just by the look he was giving me.
Needing something to do, something other than crisscross my legs back and forth, I felt his silky, black sheets. “I missed your sheets.”
Grayson dragged a thumb along his bottom lip. “I’ll always miss you in my sheets, Snitch.”
Then slowly—finally—he got beside me, but he didn’t get in the sheets.
And I was strung out.
Just from the feather-distance between us.
“Kiss me,” I begged. “Please.”
“First, tell me all your words.” He dragged a knuckle down my cheeks. “The words they stole from you. The words you couldn’t say. The words they put in your mouth.” He lay on his side, head resting on one hand. Watching me. “How are you doing, really?”
I chewed my bottom lip.
I knew what he meant.
I knew what he wanted me to say.
Where to fucking begin?
I looked for a reason not to begin. My eyes landed on the nightstand, where the green handkerchief lay, the one from our wedding.
“Why is it there?”
“To remind me every day that you’re missing. That our happily ever after isn’t complete.” He thumbed my tears. “Snitch, please, bleed with me.”
I traced anxious lines across my stomach. “I never thought I’d have to justify my actions to millions of people. This is my love story, not theirs, but they’re acting like I know how it ends.”
I kept playing it over and over in my head like a record that wouldn’t stop skipping. Was all of this heartbreak pointless, and was it all my fault?
“Did I mess everything up? Should I have run with you that night?” I turned to him, and he was already looking at me. The moon and stars his backdrop, the shadow clinging like velvet to his pouty lips and soft eyes.
Grayson.
I’d missed this, nighttime—our time.
“They don’t get it.” He traced my lips with his thumb. “They can’t. I feel sorry, they must not know love. Every single one of those women would have jumped at the chance to run away with me, Story Hale. Only you had the guts to say no. Only you cared enough to say no. Only you had the strength.”