Page 48 of Broken Empire
“We were… together.”
I scoffed. “Did we ever establish that? Did I say we were together? Didyou?”
Shay’s shoulders crumpled, and she shook her head. “No,” she said in a low voice. “We never said it. But I thought—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved a hand. “I know what you thought. But you were wrong.”
Tears were flooding Shay’s face now, splashing over her chin and dripping down her chest. She sagged on the end of the bed and buried her face in her hands, shoulders quaking as sobs wracked her body.
It broke my heart to see her like that, but I had to do it. I had to get Murray to trust me long enough to leave me alone in this room with her.
I stepped over and roughly grabbed her right shoulder. “Come on,” I said, pulling her toward the half-open door on the left side of the room. “You can cry in the bathroom while I fix your hair.”
Murray’s thin lips curved into a tight smile as he looked on. “I should go and check on the set. It’s in the room across the hall if you want to come and see it later,” he said. “Pyotr’s latest death device is… interesting, to say the least.”
I dipped my chin in an affable nod. “This hair stuff will probably take about forty-five minutes. Does that work for you?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
Murray stepped out of the room, finally leaving me alone with Shay. As I pulled her all the way into the bathroom, she took a deep, shaky breath and stared up at me through red-rimmed eyes. “I can’t believe you,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hate you. I fuckinghateyou!”
“I know,” I said gruffly, dropping her arm. “But I fucking love you.”
15
Shay
“I hate you,”I gritted out, my eyes burning with tears.
I used to think about Killian to calm me down. No matter where I was or what was happening, he was always the one my mind came back to, even if the logical part of my brain knew it was futile.
That changed five minutes ago. The betrayal was so cold, so sudden, like falling through a crack on a frozen lake and slipping into the darkness before I could try to get my bearings and grasp something solid.
How could Killian do this to me after everything we’d gone through together? How could he be so unfeeling? So vile?
“I fucking hate you!” I cried, trying to jerk my arm out of his vise-like grip.
He kept staring down at me with those treacherous blue eyes. Then he let my arm fall and leaned his face closer to me, the tip of his nose almost touching mine. “I know,” he muttered. “But I fucking love you.”
A shock went straight through me, as if I’d grasped a live wire. “What?” I whispered, unable to believe what I’d just heard.
“I love you, Shay.” Killian put his hands on either side of my face, forcing me to look at him. “All that shit I just said… I didn’t mean it. I had to make Murray believe me. That’s all it was.”
I was growing dizzy, the room spinning around me like I’d just stepped off a rollercoaster. “No,” I said, voice still scarcely above a whisper. “No, you’re doing it again. You’re putting me in another one of your sick fucking games.”
“It’s not a game,” he said. “I had to say that stuff.”
Tears were gathering in the corners of my eyes again. “The stuff you said wastrue.We never said we were together. Not really. And you never told me you loved me. We were just…”
I trailed off as my voice cracked. Killian’s face was starting to look blurry through all the tears.
He wrapped an arm around me, pulling me close to his chest. “I had to make it look real,” he said gruffly. “The best way to make a lie seem real is to put bits of the truth into it.”
“How can I believe you after—” My voice cracked again. “After all that. After everything.”
“Shay, I love you, and I’m going to keep telling you until you believe it,” Killian said, stroking my hair. “Until then, we really need to work on getting out of here. We only have forty minutes, and this place is teeming with people, including a security guard with a gun.”
I sniffed and pulled back, wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand. “You’re really here to get me out?”
