My breath labored, my vision dimming, the shallow sips I dragged into tight lungs not enough. There wasn’t enough air.
You’re hyperventilating, I thought clinically.
I held a painful breath and let it out slow. Commotion went on somewhere outside of me, followed by a scream from the gathering peanut gallery when they saw Brock’s face, which was disgusting. Addison materialized, somehow managing to look both horrified and pleased with the chaos.
“You need to leave,” she said, and I looked to Kash.
But he was looking at me.
And so was Addison.
The gravity of the situation dawned on me slowly. The Felix wedding had come to a grinding halt, the massive guest list gawking and whispering, phones out and recording. Natasha ranting, swinging her champagne around. Brock dabbing at his nose with a napkin. Kash with raw knuckles, face grim. This was not only my fault, but my responsibility. I hadn’t just breached every line of professionalism, I’d sullied the name of the company I’d worked so hard for.
And then there was Kash. Somehow, I thought he might pay the steepest price of all.
But in that moment, he didn’t seem to care. As I nodded at nothing and no one, Kash moved to my side, his hand in the small of my back, applying the gentlest pressure to guide me toward the door. I complied on numb, shaking legs, drifting by his side without knowing where he’d gotten my bag or how we got in the service elevator. Only that we were in it, then out of it, then into the cold winter night.
He opened the door to the van and helped me in, and for a moment, I sat in the silence and tried to parse what had just happened. I was fired—that was clear. Addison would get what she wanted after all. I’d been controlled in a ruse orchestrated by at least half a dozen people, strictly for their amusement.
And I’d hurt Kash, the one person who mattered.
I swallowed the lump in my throat as he climbed in and started the van.
“I … I’m—”
“Please,” he clipped, pulling out of the service parking lot. “Don’t try to explain. I don’t know if I can bear it.”
I paused, unsure as he took a shaky breath.
“Lila, I am sorry—so sorry—that they did this to you.” His teeth ground together, the steering wheel squeaking under his grip. But he wasn’t soft, and he sounded anything but forgiving. “Of all they could have done, this is too much, too far. If I could have ruined every one of those useless skinbags, I would have. I don’t care what they do to me. Fuck them. Fuck every last one of them.”
“Your job,” I breathed. “I won’t let them hurt you. I won’t let them hurt Longbourne.”
“I don’t think you have any choice in the matter. But even if you did, it’s not your concern.”
“What do you mean, it’s not my concern? Everything having to do with you is my concern.”
“I heard what you said to Addison,” he answered after a pause, his voice somehow both soft and hard. “And I’m not surprised. I hate it, but I’m not surprised. I can’t pretend I didn’t know you were out of my league.”
“What? No, it’s not about that,” I insisted. “You can’t honestly believe I meant that.”
He said nothing.
“Kash, I was trying to protect you. Protect us.”
“From what?”
“From Addison. She wanted me gone, any way she could get it. She would have used you to get to me.”
He shot me a look. “You sure you were worried about protecting me?”
I drew a breath sharp enough to sting. “Yes, you. And Longbourne.”
“I’m not afraid of them—especially not Addison Lane—and I don’t give a goddamn what they think. But you seem to.”
“Stop it. Stop saying that. I don’t care about them, how could I?” My breath hitched and hiccuped. “After … after w-what they’ve done to me, I hope every last one of them goes to hell.”
“You know,” he said as if to himself, “I didn’t think you were anything like them, but you proved me wrong, as you tend to do. They’re a den of snakes, a nest of liars, and I thought you were honest. But you lied to her about me. And you lied to me about Brock.”
I stilled.
“I saw you with him. I heard what he said. I heard him tell you how he loved you, and I heard him tell you how wrong he was. What I didn’t hear was you argue.”
“I was at work,” I countered. “I was standing at work while he bowed and scraped, his girlfriend in the next room and a pack of cameramen roaming around. With my boss trying to find any reason—any reason—to fire me. Did you really expect me to tell him what I thought right then, standing in the middle of the event I’d been charged with?”
“No, Lila. I guess I couldn’t,” he shot, the fire in him flaring. “But you didn’t tell me. You were going to. But you didn’t, and that left me wondering why. Why would you hide it from me? Haven’t I earned your trust?”
“Haven’t I earned yours?” On his silence, I pressed on, “How could I explain? In that moment, surrounded by socialites, how in the world could I have explained it all to you? You have to know I was going to tell you. And if you’d wanted to know so bad, if you’d seen the whole thing, then why not ask me? Why did you test me instead? I don’t expect subterfuge, not from you.”
“I don’t know,” he said, the heat gone, replaced by weariness and finality. “I guess I don’t trust you like I thought I did.”
I flinched from the pain of those words. “I have never given you any reason not to trust me, not one. And yet, you are so quick to assume I would turn my back on you.” Blocks. A few short blocks was all I had. I could feel the end approaching and shrank in its shadow. “That says more about you than it does about me. And if you honestly believe anything you just said, then I was wrong about you. Wrong about us.”
We fell silent as he turned the corner, my eyes on the hotel awning as it grew closer.
“Let’s face it,” he said with quiet detachment. “It was always going to end like this—we knew it from the start. My job was to be a distraction, and I think my work here is done.”
He pulled to a stop, not bothering to put it in park. But he looked at me with infinite sadness behind the blue of his eyes.
Something inside me came unraveled and collapsed. Tears, sharp and hot, stung my eyes, blurred my vision. I knew the end when I saw it. And so, I memorized his face for a long moment before opening the door and stepping into the cold.
I didn’t know if I’d ever be warm again.
25
Scorched Earth
KASH
I watched the colors in my room shift from blues to purples to buttery yellows as the sun rose, the shadows shrinking away with every tick of the clock.
My room felt foreign after spending so many nights away. It was a place I’d left behind, a place of memory. A limbo, the space between the boy I’d been and the man I’d become. That limbo had stretched on far too long, years where every day was the same and nothing ever changed.
Until her.