Page 192 of Sinful Lies

Hope? No, that wasn’t it. Hope was dangerous, like a flame you couldn’t control.

This was different.

This was something raw, something I wasn’t sure I was ready to touch.

But her words lingered, their weight settling in the cracks I thought were too far gone to hold anything.

Ashes weren’t the end. They were a beginning.

They were now the dawn of my revenge, and the dusk of my pain.

A twisted rebirth, where every burn, every scar, fed the fire that would burn down everything in its path.

Chapter

Forty-Three

“Thoughts and prayers won’t stop a speeding bullet.”

?DaShanne Stokes

Angelo

The cold of the interrogation room did nothing to still the brutal pounding in my veins, each pulse threatening to tear me apart. My breaths ripped shallow and uneven, my vision clouded with raw betrayal.

Oh, Lazzio. I’ve got too much dirt on you. I could ruin you.

Jade Whitenhouse.

The woman I was obsessed with. Crazy in love with. Head over fucking heels for. The one who haunted my every waking thought.

She hadn’t justruinedme—she’d ripped me apart from the inside out.

She’d forged her own black blade and drove it straight into my chest. Buried it so deep that the last ember of life in my heart,the one I’d fought to keep alive for thirty-six fucking years, had snuffed out.

Six years.

Six goddamn years.

The devil herself had been plotting my destruction for over half a decade, carving out my downfall piece by meticulous piece. Every fragment of my life—good, bad, dangerous—turned into a weapon. She had collected it all, crafted it into documents sharp enough to cut me down.

She’d unearthed everything: how my mother had nearly lost me before I was even born, the fevers that almost killed me as a child, the kidnapping when I was nine. Every triumph and humiliation. My master’s degrees—international business at Columbia, data security engineering at Cornell. Every deal I’d struck, every contract I’d signed for Lazzio Entertainment Group and Lazzio Exhibits Inc. Every woman who’d ever warmed my bed, single or married. Every soul I’d sent to the grave without remorse. Hell, even my fucking allergies were in that folder.

She’d handed themeverything. Every. Last. Detail. About me, my family, my empire.

She had made it her life’s mission to tear me apart, to burn everything I was to the ground, and watch it all turn to ashes.

And she succeeded.

Just not in the way she thought.

Jade Whitenhouse made me fall for her, so fucking deep, I was already lost—just to watch me crawl to her, and destroy me.

The words I said to her a few weeks ago keep playing in my head, taunting me.

I’m starting to think you might kill me, Jade. And you know what? I’d let you.

But if I had only known back then how fucking wrong I was—how the very flames of her love, which I thought would heal me, would end up burning down the last shreds of my soul.

---