Page 117 of Secrets (The Sins Trilogy 2)
“Thanks.” He leads me to the huge sitting area that overlooks a rose garden. “Something to drink?”
“Anything’s fine.”
He pours two glasses of his favorite scotch and hands me one. We clink silently.
“Is Iris coming after work?” he asks after a sip. “She could’ve told Elizabeth she wanted to leave early.”
“She isn’t coming.”
“Why not?” A shadow crosses Ryder’s blue eyes. “You still think… You still don’t trust me?”
I shake my head. “You’re so far off the mark, you aren’t even on the board. If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t be here at all.” I try to brace myself for the pain, but it’s pointless, like trying to shore up a dam after a flood destroyed everything. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” He looks at me like I’m speaking Martian. “But she’s still at the foundation.”
“Something happened to her. I proposed, and she just…” I can’t continue. Saying it out loud makes it feel too real. Something set in stone.
“She said no?” His voice is soft with sympathy.
Somehow, the sympathy makes me feel even worse. Is my situation that obvious? She didn’t exactly say no. It’s so much worse—I can’t fix it. I’ve failed somewhere along the way to protect her and make sure she’s all right. “She left.”
“She what?”
“She’s staying with Yuna now.”
“But dude, she loves you. No woman could look at you the way she did at the club and not be totally in love with you.”
“I thought that too.” And that’s why the rejection wasn’t just unexpected but unrecoverable from—a KO that left me so punch-drunk that I can never get back up.
“Did you screw up? Forget the ring?”
I laugh hollowly. “I got a custom Masako Hayashi.”
“Okay, fine. It wasn’t the ring.” Ryder runs a palm down his face. “You think she’s starting to remember the past?”
I already considered that possibility. “No. If she were, she wouldn’t have looked so sad.” She would’ve slapped my face. After cutting my balls off.
“Don’t you think you should tell her, though? I mean, before someone else does?”
I swallow a mouthful of scotch. I know I should. I’ve been avoiding that because I don’t know how to do it without making her hate me. And there’s the matter of timing. How am I going to just blurt out that I knew who she really was all along but didn’t tell her? How am I going to deal with the nuclear fallout? “I’ve come too far to do that.”
“Hey, it’s never too late.”
Spoken like a man who has everything. “It is this time. I built a castle on a poor foundation. To fix it, I’d have to wreck it and start over…except I don’t think I can.”
“Nothing stays secret forever.”
I drink more scotch, trying to soothe the acid burn in my belly with the liquor. Ryder’s right, but I don’t want to think about it. Besides, unless Iris regains her memory, nobody’s going to tell her. Yuna and Harry won’t. Harry will already have told Edgar—Harry tells Edgar everything—so my brothers won’t be talking. My parents disowned me, so nothing’s going to come from that quarter. Sam and Marty are too dirty to talk. As a matter of fact, they’ll do their very best to hide who Iris really is because they gave her the false identity.
“It’s going to be worse if she doesn’t hear it first from you,” Ryder adds.
I know that, but… “If I tell her, she’ll hate me for sure.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Because she’s the way she is because of me.” Since I can’t dwell on it without losing my mind, I add, “It’s complicated.”
I tilt my empty glass, and Ryder pours me more scotch. He’s right about everything. Keeping up the lies is a shitty thing to do, except I have no idea how to get out of the situation. Maybe the time to be honest was at Hammers and Strings.
