Page 105 of Feed Your Fiends

“My baby likes cars, too. Even though she was run over by one, she isn’t afraid of them. You remember my baby, Elle? You met her a few days ago.”

He’s momentarily dumbfounded, but then he straightens and turns stoic. “How could I forget? She asked me for money to keep our accident a secret. I did bump into her two years ago, but that’s because she ran into the street.”

My eye ticks at the word‘our’.There is no our butours.

“Since you obviously know about it now, I guess we can talk freely.”

“You don’t have to guess,” I say, waiting.

He sighs. “Look, Gant, we don’t know each other very well like you’ve said. But I know Elle. As in, I know girls like her.”

“Do you?”

He nods. “I meet them all the time, or rather, they conveniently run into me. You do a few interviews and podcasts about rags to riches. About how you went from the orphanage to a real estate tycoon and they come out of the woodwork. They all know your name before you can tell them it.”

“And you think Elle knew who you were?”

“I don’t think. Iknow. I’m not talking about the night of the accident, but when she saw me again before the play with Sylo. I’d driven the car that night. I think she looked me up and pieced it together, the little extortionist. It’s why she pushed for you to meet Delphine in order to get to me. Because she did push for you to meet Delphine, didn’t she? You ignored your aunt for years after Marisol’s death, and then, out of the blue, you have a change of heart?”

“You’re very intuitive.”

“It comes from decades of dealing with people like her. She knew how happy your visit would make Delphine. How happy it could make you to see a resemblance of your mother alive again. And while you were distracted, she pounced because she knew I’d pay anything to keepmybaby happy. To keep our secret and the newfound peace of our family reunion that was a long time coming. Now she’s six figures richer, and Delphine is none the wiser. And we can keep it that way, right?”

Wrong.

And that’s the wrong accident.

Did he and Elle only discuss their run-in and not my mother's? Mine? But that doesn’t make sense. Elle knows it’s the same driver.

“I bet she didn’t come on to you untilafterthe play, right? That’s when she really pushed.”

I can’t stop the smile spreading across my lips even as I try to bite the corner.Come on to me?I pushed and pushed until I finally split her open and drank her bloody sacrifice.

“Damn.You really do know all about girls like her.”

He nods, his stiff shoulders creeping down to their normal position by the second. “It was inevitable that you’d learn the hard way too, with your tax bracket. Better now than later. They’re all the same, after your money but never your love.”

After my money?I think of the panties Elle refused to wear until now. A lofty, gold-digging goal indeed.

But my blood crackles and pops at the wordlove. No one can tell me that Elle doesn’t love me. Not even Elle herself. I refuse to believe it because I refuse to hurt. I refuse to torture myself the way Elle tortures herself. Bart had tortured me enough. He was the champion of hurt, and he’d beaten me with it so badly, dulled me to the pain so bluntly that no tactic works.

Not the death portrait.

Not insulting the cunty canal I slid out of.

Not his plans to murder my bastard brother.

Not his threats to excise the only love I have left.

Nothing.

But Silas doesn’t know that.

He doesn’t know that talking about my dove, telling me what she’s done or hasn’t done will never hurt me because it doesn’t matter. Elle is the constant. Everyone and everything else are pieces, obstacles that can be moved and burned and never thought of again.

That hurt he thinks he’s stabbing through my heart only pisses me off.

He has the nerve to touch my shoulder. “I'm sorry you had to find out about this. I thought she’d take the money like she promised and disappear.”

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