Page 222 of A Vicious Love

The anger that rose in me was patient and black.

Sienna kept speaking because she had not seen my temper shift. Or maybe she had and trusted it would point elsewhere.

“For three years, my social outings were with you,” she said. “Balls. Benefits. Launches. Cars. Tables. That made it look as if I still had a place.”

I looked at her.

The bed between us became a ledger I did not want to read.

She had been placed beside me because Bellemere couldn’t place her anywhere else. I had made the placement miserable. I remembered cars where she tried to tell me about rehearsals while I took calls. Ballrooms where she held out her hand because I had never given mine first. Bars where she ordered what I drank because she remembered details I had offered by accident. Doorways where I left her behind with a polite smile frozen on her face.

Her social life had been a corridor I controlled without even caring.

“I thought you were waiting for Damius to die,” she said.

“That was your theory?”

“It made sense. Damius forced the old terms. Once he died, maybe you could negotiate your way out. End the debt. Offer my family something else.” She gave a tiny shrug. “But he won’t die. Too much biotech.”

“Too much spite.”

“That too.”

“His doctors call it longevity management.”

“That sounds prettier than refusing death.”

“Damius refuses everything until it signs.”

A small laugh escaped her.

She turned slightly toward me. “You’ll find another way.”

“You have faith in me escaping our merger?”

Her brows drew together. “I mean you’re clever.”

“To get away from you.”

“No.” She sat up a little, alarmed by the way it sounded. “No, I mean… you managed three years before we had our first dinner alone. That takes dedication. If anyone could find a way out of something impossible, it would be you.”

She was trying to comfort me.

That was the fucking horror of it.

Sienna Bellemere half naked under the sheets, was comforting me with the belief that I could free myself from marrying her.

I stared at the ceiling because looking at her became difficult in a way that had no use.

I could not find an easy place to put the knowledge that she had survived three years by believing I would eventually abandon her properly.

“Jamison?” she said quietly.

I looked back.

Her hair had fallen loose over one shoulder. She was trying to gather it without lifting the blanket too high. The ribbon she used for sleep sat on the bedside table near me.

I reached for it. “Turn around sweetheart.”