Page 147

I reached for them, only to have her pull them back slightly.

“Silas,” she said, voice measured. “She would never—”

“Yet she did.” I snatched the keys and strode to the side exit, tossing my keys to the employee to fetch my car, then peeling out of the convention center.

I didn’t go back to the hotel to get my things, to be confronted with the memories of hours spent in the bed, of soft sighs and whispered conversations, of her fingers tracing over my skin and her soft hair spilling across my shoulder.

Whatever was left there, she could have, could keep.

Like the part of me that had believed.

In her.

In us.

In something I swore didn’t exist.

But had started to feel.

A word, a feeling that she’d spent hours actively trying to make me believe in, to convince me was real.

Only to find out it was all a lie, a betrayal wrapped in something dangerously close to love.

I dragged a hand down my face, a bitter, disbelieving laugh slipping out before I could stop it.

Of course this was how it ended.

This was what happened when you let yourself be swayed, when you sold yourself and your beliefs out because someone worked tirelessly to change you.

All that time spent arguing, pushing back, insisting that love was nothing more than a convenient fiction people told themselves so they didn’t have to admit just how transactional everything really was—

And what did I do?

I bought in.

Not all at once.

Worse.

I let it happen in pieces.

Little bits of myself lost in each conversation that lasted a little too long, glances I didn’t look away from quickly enough, touches I didn’t immediately pull away from.

I knew better.

That was what got under my skin, burrowed in, became scratchy.

I knew how this worked. I’d seen it happen time and time again through the ages. I’d built my entire internal philosophy around it—picked it apart and tore it down to what it really was beneath it all.

Convenience.

Wanting.

Yet I let myself believe, however briefly, that this was different.

A snort escaped me.

That was what made it so perfect, wasn’t it?