Page 9 of Beautiful Liar

Concern attempts to shift her Botoxed forehead. “Quinn, I’m really worried about you,” she murmurs.

I laugh. A genuine, hearty-as-apple-pie laugh that splits my face. Sadly, it doesn’t last. It too is sucked into the empty void. “You’re worried about me?” There’s only a thin veneer of reason left. I need to leave this place. Now. Her nod stops me.

“Yes,” she replies. Her hands tremble as she resumes dressing.

“You really are delusional, aren’t you?”

She finishes buttoning her blouse and zips up her skirt. “I don’t know why you’re being this way.”

I laugh again. “Don’t you, Adriana? What does your shrink say about our little arrangement?”

She pales and her mouth drops open. “How do you know about that?”

I scoff at her expression. “What, you think it’s some big secret that you have a shrink too? I guess I should be comforted to know you’re not too far gone to recognize that you need help. So, tell me, is there a diagnosis for your condition?”

The breath shakes out of her. “I…I’m not prepared to discuss it with you. Like our sessions, mine is also confidential. You get what that means, right?” She’s regaining her composure. Her voice holds a touch of warning. I want to laugh again, but the whole fucked up situation suddenly weighs me down.

“Cut the confidential crap, Adriana. I started coming to you when I was seventeen. You’ve been sucking my cock since my eighteenth birthday—I’m guessing crossing the line into pedophilia was a step too far for you?”

Her bravado vanishes. She holds out a hand. “You’re not…You can’t tell anyone about us, Quinn.”

“There is no us!” I hiss. “And don’t deny a part of you wants to be discovered. You blow me most of the time with your door unlocked, after all. The idea of someone walking in on us gives you a cheap thrill, doesn’t it?”

Her pale face turns guilty. But her gaze rushes over me with sickeningly carnal hunger.

I stride to the door and wrench it open.

“Same time next week,” she says behind me.

I leave without responding.

***

Two hours later, I’m in the VIP lounge of XYNYC, the Soho club I co-own with an old college buddy. It’s one of several business ventures in which I’m a silent partner because all that obscene Blackwood money needs to go somewhere, right?

I nurse another whiskey and watch scantily-clad girls dance below my roped off lounge. Several cast suggestive glances my way. I clinically assess and discard, my gaze searching but not finding what I’m looking for. I wonder why I even bother. Maybe I don’t want to give in to the inevitability of the expanding blackness just yet?

In spite of knowing and accepting my fate, does a part of me want things to be different?

My phone buzzes in my pocket, the fourth time since I got here. I abandon my useless thoughts but ignore the phone. I’m not in the mood to deal with Maxwell Blackwood. He can wait.

I settle on a skinny brunette in a silver backless dress and crook a finger at her.

The swiftness with which she abandons her friends and hops up the steps to me is almost comical. I nod at the bouncer to let her in and take her back to the velvet couches grouped in the back. My private waiter delivers a glass of vintage champagne to her. I sit back in the seat and don’t protest when she settles her long-legged figure next to me. Over a thumping The Weekend number, she babbles about fuck knows what. I don’t speak. With her third glass of champagne, she grows bolder. She leans closer and her fingers tease my shirt button. Sultry words whisper in my ear.

I allow my hand to play in her hair as I slip deeper into my personal void. I note absently that the blackness is increasing since I gave up my attempts to hold it back.

My phone buzzes again as her hand creeps over my crotch.

I lay my head back and unlock the vault where my darkest plans reside.

In eighteen months, I’ll be thirty.

I’ll inherit fifteen billion dollars.

I’ll be one of the richest men on earth.

I’ll also, if my plans succeed, be a murderer.

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