Lust Games (Revenge!)

I still remember the exact moment my life split in two.

Before. And after.

The rain had been falling for hours. The kind that doesn't announce itself. It simply arrives and stays. Just like betrayal.

My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. Not from the cold. Not from the rain. From the words still bouncing around inside my skull, ricocheting like a bullet with nowhere to land.

Your husband is a fugitive.

I pressed the gas harder.

He defrauded 58 shareholders. 120 million dollars. Two tickets. Thailand.

The wipers cut back and forth across the glass, frantic and useless. I couldn't see the road properly. I wasn't sure I cared.

He ran off with that woman.

That was the one that did it. Not the money. Not the company. Not the empire my father had built with his bare hands, now crumbling to dust because of the man I had chosen to love. It was those five words, hissed through Theo's clenched teeth like something he'd been holding back for a very long time.

He ran off with that woman.

I had looked at Theo, my best friend, my law partner, the one person I'd trusted above all others, and I had seen it in his eyes. He had known. Maybe not everything. But enough. Enough to have said something. Enough to have warned me. He had chosen silence instead.

So I left him standing in the rain outside the police station, his palms pressed flat against my car window, his mouth moving around words I refused to hear. I drove away without looking back.

That was my first mistake of the night.

The second was believing I could outrun what I was feeling.

I don't know exactly when my eyes gave out. One moment I was on the main road, city lights smearing through the wet glass, and the next there was nothing. My body had simply had enough. The grief, the rage, the years of holding myself upright when everything beneath me was already gone. It all caved in at once, like a building whose foundation had been eaten away long before anyone noticed the cracks.

The wheel slipped from my hands.

I remember the screech of tires. That strange suspended second when the world tilts and you understand, with perfect terrible calm, that you are no longer in control of anything.

Then impact. Metal. Glass. Silence.

I opened my eyes to rain on my face.

Or maybe it was blood. It was warm, at least, sliding down the side of my face where my head had met the window. The car was tilted at an ugly angle, half up on the curb, the engine still ticking its slow death. One headlight blinked weakly in the dark.

I tried to move. Pain answered instead.

Kai. The thought came before anything else. My son. Four years old, waiting at home with Natya, probably dragging every cushion off the couch, probably asking every ten minutes when Mommy was coming home.

I had to get up.

I pressed my hand to the door, pushed, and then I saw them.

Shoes. Black leather. Moving through the rain toward me with the unhurried ease of someone who has never needed to rush because the world has always rearranged itself around him.

I tried to lift my head to see more but the darkness moved faster than I did. It pulled me under before I could make out anything beyond the clean line of a dark suit, the width of a pair of shoulders, the stillness of a man who seemed entirely unmoved by the wreckage in front of him.

The last thing I felt was the rain stopping.

As if he had brought the quiet with him.

When I woke there was no hospital smell. No lights humming above me. Instead there was a crystal chandelier catching the afternoon sun and throwing it across the ceiling in a hundred small pieces of light. White linen, impossibly soft. Somewhere far away, birds.

My head was pounding. My leg felt packed with cement.

I turned my head and found him.

He was sitting in an armchair across the room, one ankle crossed over his knee, a cigar burning between his fingers. He wasn't watching me with concern. He wasn't hovering. He was simply there. Settled into himself the way very few people ever learn to be.

Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Eyes like deep water, the kind that looks still on the surface and keeps its secrets underneath.

He took a slow drag, let the smoke curl up toward the ceiling, and said without looking at me:

I didn't expect car drifting to be among your hobbies, Counselor.

I stared at him.

My consciousness was slipping, I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. I had no control over the steering.

He looked at me then. One long, unhurried look.

Then tell me. His voice was low and even, the kind that doesn't ask so much as expect. What made you become a walking corpse?

Something about the directness of it cracked me open. Maybe it was the concussion. Maybe it was that he asked without softening it first, without the careful tiptoe everyone around me had perfected. He asked like he actually wanted to know the answer.

So I told him.

The man I thought I loved, the father of my child, didn't just betray me. He stole my company. He stole my father's life's work. Then he got on a plane with another woman. My voice didn't shake. I had used all my shaking up on the steering wheel. Is that enough of an explanation for you?

He said nothing. No mockery. No hollow reassurance. Just silence, steady as stone.

Go ahead, I said, the bitterness finally surfacing. Tell whoever you want. I'm sure it'll make a spectacular headline. Lilya Voss, betrayed, defrauded, destroyed.

Still nothing. Just those unreadable eyes holding mine.

I don't feel well, I said finally. Can I sleep?

Something moved across his face, there and gone so fast I almost missed it. Not quite softness. More like recognition, the look of someone who has seen this kind of exhaustion before and maybe worn it himself.

Sleep well, Lilya, he said.

He stood, tall and broad in a way that had nothing to do with taking up space and everything to do with simply being, and moved toward the door. I watched his silhouette through closing eyes, that last image pressing itself into the back of my mind before everything went dark again.

I didn't know his name yet.

I didn't know what he was.

I didn't know that the man who had pulled me from the wreckage was the most dangerous thing I had ever survived.

But somewhere behind my ribs, in a room that had been locked and quiet for years, something stirred.

Pay attention, it said.

In the corridor outside, a man in a dark suit was waiting. The stranger paused. Spoke two sentences, quiet and precise.

I want everything there is to know about Lilya Voss. And especially, her husband.

Then he walked away into the shadow of his own house.

His name was Alec Cortez.

And he had just decided to play.