Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Two days. He’ll be gone two days. I can survive two days.
Except on Thursday night, alone in my apartment with the window cracked and the city noise drifting in, I open my phone and the preter gossip feeds are on fire.
And there he is.
The Prince of Atlantis, with a woman I’ve never seen before. A Lyccan. Golden and stunning and draped against him in photographs that look nothing like a business trip and everything like the life he had before me.
My phone buzzes. Trish.
Trish: DON’T SPIRAL. Let me look into this.
But I’m already spiraling. Because this is what Billy taught me. This is the lesson that lives in my bones.
Everyone leaves.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PHOTOS ARE EVERYWHERE.
I’m sitting on my bathroom floor at 11:47 PM on a Thursday, which is day five of seven, and Lauren Ashford’s face is on every preter gossip feed I can find.
Lauren Ashford, who is tall and golden and Lyccan and has cheekbones that could cut glass, with her arm looped through Alexei’s and her head tilted against his shoulder and a smile on her face that says this man is mine and I know it and so does everyone else.
The photos are intimate. Not scandalous, not explicit, just...close. The closeness that comes from familiarity. His hand on the small of her back (the same place he puts his hand on mine). Her fingers adjusting his collar (the casual possessiveness of a woman who has done this a hundred times). The two of them at what looks like a formal event, her dress gold, his suit dark, their bodies angled toward each other with the gravitational ease of two people who have shared space for a long time.
The caption on the gossip feed reads: Sources confirm Prince Alexei Lykaios was seen with former partner Lauren Ashford at a private event earlier this week. The timing is notable given his recent engagement to human Zia Morgan.
Earlier this week.
He was with her earlier this week.
While he was kissing me in corridors and sending me breakfast and noticing that I don’t eat fish, he was with her. At a private event. With her hand on his collar and her head on his shoulder and her body curved into his like she’d never left.
My phone buzzes. Trish.
Trish: Have you seen this
Trish: ZIA
Trish: Those photos are OLD. Look at his hair. It’s longer. That’s not how he looks now
I stare at her message. I zoom in on the photos. His hair. Is it longer? I can’t tell. I can’t tell because my eyes are blurring and my hands are shaking and the rational part of my brain, the part that designs polymer casings and calibrates dispersion algorithms, has been completely overridden by the part that remembers Billy.
Because this is what happened with Billy.
Not photos. Not a gossip feed. But the same architecture of betrayal: the slow realization that the man you trusted was somewhere else, with someone else, being someone else, while you sat in the dark believing you were the only one.
Billy’s mother told him to end it. He did. Four sentences. No warning.
And now the Prince of Atlantis, who kissed me at my desk three days ago, who had his hand under my shirt, whose breathing went ragged against my neck, who notices my air vent, is in photographs with a Lyccan shifter whose body language screams we never stopped.
Trish: Zia please answer me
Trish: Those are OLD PHOTOS someone is messing with you
I pick up my phone. Not to answer Trish.
I open my thread with Alexei. The messages are sparse. He doesn’t text much. There’s the logistics message Ruby sent through his phone about the Expo, and one message from him, just one, sent Tuesday morning after the corridor kiss:
The breakfast will include miso soup tomorrow. You mentioned it once to the cleaning crew.
He remembered that I mentioned miso soup to the cleaning crew.
And now there are photos of him with a beautiful Lyccan woman and I can’t breathe.
I type.
I saw the photos. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Please don’t contact me.
Four sentences. I realize, as I hit send, that I’ve just written Billy’s text. The same structure. The same cowardice. The same running.
I put my phone face down on the bathroom floor and I cry.
Not the dignified kind. The kind where your whole body participates, where your ribs ache and your throat closes and every sob sounds like it’s being ripped out of you by something that doesn’t care how much it hurts. I cry for Billy and for Alexei and for the stupid, reckless hope I let myself feel when he got on his knees in my mind and whispered my name like a prayer, except he didn’t, that was the fantasy I was building, the story I was writing in my head where someone finally chose me and meant it.