Page 41 of Dash

Thena

His words struck me like the blow of a lash. I stood there, unable to think, staring at a furious Dash, incapable of making sense of what he’d just said. I’d made sure. The pictures. They were real. He’d cheated on me. Hadn’t he?

“Listen to me.” Dash’s harsh tone startled me out of my confusion. “I’m only gonna explain this once.”

The lines between his eyebrows cut deep into his skin and a vein popped up on his forehead. He was pissed, as furious as only a righteous man could be.

“Your father wanted Nix to marry some pedigreed poodle, a blue-blood heiress from the East Coast.” The chill in his voice iced my insides. “Remember that?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nix did everything in his power to defy old man Astor,” he explained, businesslike, as if he was talking about the weather. “Your control freak of a father put a detective on Nix to make sure he knew everything his son was doing. Your father was afraid Nix was gonna do something to tank his plans to marry him to the wealthy heiress.”

“I… um…” I paused to scrub my face. “I don’t follow.”

“Yeah, you do.” His cold smirk cut me to the quick. “It’s pick and choose with you. Who’s innocent. Who’s guilty. Well, here’s the truth you never asked me about.”

The anger that flattened his words curdled my blood. In all our years together, he’d never spoken to me like this, as if he was making a huge effort not to shout, as if it had been I who’d betrayed him.

“Your father was right,” Dash said. “Nix made sure that such an engagement never happened. He met this woman insome Egyptian resort while we were on leave. It wasn’t a love match. They were in it for fun. Nix wanted photos in public spaces to make sure the heiress understood that he wasn’t into her and the marriage wasn’t gonna happen.”

“Are you saying it was Nix who was running around with that woman?” My heart shriveled in my chest. “It wasn’t you?”

“If you go back into the influencer’s archives, you can verify this. You’ll find plenty of pictures of her and Nix posing for her blog. Contact the woman if you don’t believe me. She’ll tell you.”

Could he be telling the truth?

I’d avoided looking through the influencer’s account for fear of finding more pictures of Dash and her. Back then, I couldn’t take more heartbreak. Now my body was growing colder in proportion to the chill radiating from Dash.

His growing detachment as he spoke horrified me. As if this conversation didn’t suck enough, an impending sense of doom weighed down my chest. I had an awful feeling that the suck was only gonna get worse. A new kind of fear contracted my insides, terror that what he was saying was true.

“Nix’s bed partner was a travel blogger,” Dash continued, giving me zero time to process. “She was willing to meet him in different countries while we were deployed. Since your father was up to no good, Nix hatched a plan. You know Nix. He loved to outsmart the old fox.”

Nix had spent a lifetime defying my father. Father had tried to impose his will on Nix. With Dash’s assistance, Nix had slipped from under his thumb every single time.

“Here’s how this worked.” Dash tapped a picture with the blunt tip of his finger. “Whenever we had shore leave, Nix would take off early to engage the detective in a chase. I’d bring the woman to whatever hotel he settled on. As these pictures reveal, Nix also allowed the detective to earn his keep. It was his way ofgiving your father the finger. So yeah, that’s me opening the door for that woman in those pictures. But no, I didn’t cheat on you.”

I forced the words through my throat. “Are you saying that—?”

“Your father lied to you.” A “Y” shaped vein etched the center of his forehead like the confluence of two raging rivers on a map. “And you chose to believe him over me.”

The ground opened under my feet. I fell into an endless void. Three years of assumptions I’d embraced as truth came crashing down, crushing me beneath the ruins of my life. If Dash was right, if he was telling the truth, I’d been the one who’d wronged him.

“No,” I shook my head, unable to accept the implications. “My father wouldn’t lie. I mean, he did lie often, but not to me.”

“He lied to you.” Dash pinned me under his incensed stare. “Worse, you believed him. You never even gave me the chance to explain, let alone the courtesy of telling me why you had me thrown out of your father’s penthouse. I bet he was very satisfied with himself.”

“Father was cruel, sure, but…” I clasped my trembling hands together and shook my head, still in denial. “This seems over the top, even for him.”

“Youhadto know.” Dash’s face was a mask of grimness. “At some level, you had to have known that this was your father, playing his toxic games.”

“I didn’t know!” I found it hard to breathe. “I’m not an idiot. I had the pictures authenticated.”

“You threw me out as if I were horse shit.”

“Those pictures—”

“They look pretty damning, I agree.” He shook his head sadly before he walloped me with his glare. “Unless you knew me, my character. Unless you understood who I was and how much I loved you.”

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