Page 113 of Bene

Bene followed her.

And when she spun around to face him as he entered the bathroom behind her, she swore the only thing she saw in his stare was pure hatred. It only worsened when his gaze dropped to the large engagement ring glittering on her finger.

Yeah.

He definitely knew.

“Were you engaged to him the whole time?”

Bene wasn’t sure why that was the first thing he decided to ask Vanna when he got her alone—a dangerous thing to even attempt, considering their circumstances, and yet he couldn’t control the urge to follow her when he saw her leave the dining room. No one was even watching them when everyone’s eyes were trained on the men sitting at the table opposite to one another.

God knew he should have asked her a million other things. Who in the fuck did she think she was coming after his family, to start, and had he been her target from the very beginning because she saw him as the weakest link in his family … or was he just a chance encounter that she couldn’t help but take?

No, instead he asked about that man.

The one he saw touch her.

Get close.

Who he had been told, just recently, she was engaged to.

Engaged.

Vanna shook her head. “No, that was—”

“No suffices,” he bit out.

“It’s not the whole story, though.”

“You think I care about your story?”

She blinked. “If not for an explanation, then why follow me back here at all?”

“Maybe I wanted the chance to choke the fucking life out of you while I could.”

He expected to see fear from the threat.

She showed none.

Because of course …

She had to know it was an empty threat.

A lie.

One of many he was sure to speak with her.

“My whole life,” she tried to say, “I was told this was my purpose … to take from your family the way they took from mine. That I didn’t have a family because of yours. And by the time I started to think a past I had never even experienced wasn’t enough to justify what I was doing, it was too late for me to fix it. No one knew what I was doing with you, or about my plans until much later when I was already trying to figure out a way to make it better, and it went downhill fast.”

Things made sense, then.

It clicked all at once with the shit he knew about Vanna—information he had been able to get pulled about her family history, and where she came from—with the stuff he knew about his parents’ history. How their worlds had intertwined before either of them even knew one another all because of a manipulative woman his father married before he ever even met Bene’s mother.

Pasts always came back to bite.

And it hurt.

“I don’t need you to tell me anything, you know?” he said, shaking his head as he sneered a bit. “Once I finally decided to really look into you, it turns out you weren’t very fucking hard to figure out. Where you came from? Why you did this to us? I don’t need you to say it because I know.”