Page 32 of Beautifully Deranged

I let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Not my—Lola, we agreed to be exclusive.” My voice is rough, barely controlled, like an animal gnashing its teeth behind bars.

She scoffs. “That deal ended the second you shit-talked me, Mikhail.”

I can’t breathe.

Can’t think.

The walls close in.

The thought slithers back in, poisoning everything: someone touched her. Someone’s hands, someone’s mouth, someone’s cock. My grip tightens on her waist, fingers digging in. “Tell me you didn’t.”

Her lips curl into something cold. Cruel.

She tilts her head, feigning sympathy. “What is it, Mikhail? You don’t like that your convenient fuck found another convenient fuck?”

My knees nearly buckle. I press more of my weight into her, crushing her against the door. Needing to feel her. Needing something real to hold on to. “You’re lying,” I whisper. But it sounds weak. Desperate.

She smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Am I?”

I shake my head. My hands roam over her body, as if I can erase whoever touched her. As if I can undo what’s been done. “You’re mine, Lola. Mine.”

She shakes her head. Denying me. Denying that she’s mine.

Mine.

“That man, the one who gets to call me his, he would never say I’m mediocre at my passion. He wouldn’t reduce me to a girl who spreads her legs when he needs a ride.”

Shame swallows me whole. The weight of my own words presses on my chest like a slab of stone. “Lola, I’m so fucking sorry—”

“Shove your apologies up your ass,” she snaps. “I don’t want to hear them.” She’s never been like this with me. Never looked at me like I was beneath her, like I was something rotten she couldn’t wait to scrape off.

Now I see it. My Lola has two sides. One is sweet. So sweet you’d rip your own heart out to hand it to her. The other? Cruel. So cruel you’d take the same knife and drive it into your own throat just to make it stop. And I deserve this.

God, I deserve this.

She spits in my face. If she thinks this is punishment, she’s dead wrong. She could spit in my mouth, and I’d thank her. “I am not some whore, Mikhail,” she breathes. “Everything I gave you, I gave you out of love.”

My breath shudders out of me as she confesses what I’ve always known. She loves me.

I broke the heart of a woman who actually fucking loves me. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I was trying to keep you safe—”

“The man who keeps me safe would burn the world for me,” she snaps. “You know what, Mikhail? I was wrong about you.”

I shake my head, body screaming to stop her from saying the words I already see forming.

“I thought you were the man I wanted to spend my life with. But I was so, so wrong. You’re not man enough to protect me,” she goes on. “Whatever you were keeping me safe from, you had to shove me aside to do it. Treated me like a two-penny whore.”

I flinch.

“A man I’d want to spend my life with,” she whispers, pressing her palm to my chest, feeling the way my heart slams against my ribs, “would make the threat swallow those two pennies before ever painting me like that.”

“You’re cruel,” I rasp.

“That’s your fault for not seeing it from the start…”

Her lips brush mine for just a second before pulling back, leaving me starving. “Just like it’s mine for not seeing you for the coward you are.”

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