Page 58 of Fractured Loyalties
“Maybe you’ll make the yearbook now,” Blair says, her voice pitched just for me.
I slam the phone into my bag and push past Tess, past everyone, past all the staring eyes and the clamped lips and the unspoken judgments.
I make it as far as the girls’ bathroom before I lose it.
No wonder he was so nice to me. He knew.
He. Fucking. Knew.
And now, I’m going to fuckingkillhim.
Twenty-Three
ROMAN
My cock is already throbbingwith all the things I want to do with Ivy this afternoon. I’ve cleared my fucking schedule, and Irena is Paris-bound for the next few days.
However, the moment Ivy climbs into the passenger seat, Iknowsomething is wrong.
“Bad day?” I’m already contemplating how I can make it better for her. “Ivy?”
“Don’t,” she snaps, and the single syllable hits me in the gut with more force than my father’s left hook.
I study her profile for a second. The skin under her eyes is purple, and her lip is swollen, clearly bitten. Her knuckles are raw and split in two places. At first, I thought maybe she got into a fight.
But that makes no sense.
“You gonna tell me what this is about, or do I have to start guessing?”
Ivy’s fingers dig into her thigh, deep enough to leave marks. “You fucking know what it’s about, Roman.” Her voice is like cut glass. “Don’t act as if you’re not the reason everyone at school is calling me—” She cuts herself off, a look of disgust on her face.
“Calling you what?”
She turns on me, her eyes reddened and angry. “Don’t fucking play dumb. You sent it to everyone, didn’t you? My whole fucking life is a joke now, and you did it for what? A laugh? To prove something to your father?”
A sharp, ugly sound jumps out of my throat. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She pulls her phone from her pocket and shoves the screen in my face. It’s paused on a video, one with my hand fisted in her hair, her face ruined and desperate. I, shadowed, unmistakably the villain, but she the star.
Oh shit… Oh fucking shit. They had eyes inherroom.
My brain freezes, then starts running again at a higher speed, overclocked and overheating. I feel fucking murderous.
“I didn’t do this,” I mutter, barely able to breathe. “I would never?—”
She laughs, and the sound is so empty I seriously want to kill something.
“You’re the only one who’s ever had any access to me. You and your fucking pictures and your surveillance of my entire life!”
I want to argue, but I don’t know how. The video is real. I can’t deny its existence, but… I didn’t do it.
Ivy’s voice drops. “Everyone’s seen it, Roman.Everyone. You fucking destroyed me, and you probably got off on it.”
We’re already almost back to the estate, and my head is spinning, but I have to keep trying to win her back. “You really think I’d do this to you? After everything? After what I said to you?”
She snorts, ugly. “Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t care about me. You just want to own me.”
“Maybe I do,” I can’t argue with that. “But I don’t fucking share.”
