Always so crude, even when he’s sweet.

He tapped the vehicle’s roof. “Try to sleep, despite the adrenaline. You rocked this shit, Emilia. I’m proud of you. I’ll pick you up for lunch tomorrow at twelve. Good night.”

THE UNIVERSE WAS ROOTING FOR me that week.

Dean had stopped being a pussy-ass motherfucker and decided to help me out. He not only threw a party complete with dozens of people who spotted me, in the unlikely event that Jo was going to explore prosecuting me for what happened to the mansion, but he actually took the LeBlancs to get furniture and go grocery shopping. It was with mixed feelings that I’d watched his interaction with Charlene, because the fucker was charming and she actually liked him. I could see it in the way she looked at him that she wished her daughter had stayed with him. She was going to have to get used to me.

Josephine was not on the premises when her house burst into flames. I’d asked a guy I knew to drive by on his Harley, with a ski mask, and throw a firebomb near the garage. He did.

Two hundred thousand dollars, it cost me.

But the Spencer mansion was gone. Wiped from the face of the earth. The scars on the blackened, muddy ground were the only proof that it had ever truly existed.

The next morning, my stepmother sent me a formal text informing me that she was moving to Maui. I texted back that she should leave her inheritance where I could fucking see it because she wasn’t going anywhere, hell included, with my money.

She didn’t reply, but the message was clear. I’d won. She’d lost. At life. At death. At everything that’d mattered.

It wasn’t easy to get back to New York in time for the gallery showing. I had to bribe someone who flew coach to sell me his ticket. I paid double the price, but I made it to the exhibition. And when I got to the gallery, unsure of what I was going to say to her, she did all the work for me.

She’d painted me.

Not only did she paint me (and arguably gave me a better nose than the one I was born with), but it was also what I was doing in the painting that made me smile like a sleaze ball. I was holding a joint and laughing into a non-existent camera—though my eyes were still mine, kind of sad and dark and fucking scary—and I wore a simple black T-shirt that said “Black” in white. The background was stark, stupid pink.

I was her black.

And she was my pink.

I bought the painting in a heartbeat, dragging her boss aside. Gay, thank fuck. He was there with his boyfriend, Roi. By that time, I noticed Emilia was standing next to my image, talking about it with a woman, and I hoped I wasn’t too late to buy it myself.

I wasn’t.

Emilia didn’t know it yet, but she was going to paint another painting, of herself wearing a pink shirt against a black background, and I was going to hang it next to mine.

The next day, I arrived at the gallery promptly at noon. She was standing in the doorway in a blue and white sailor dress and orange pumps, waiting for me with a smile. It looked so simple. Her, on this spring day, giving me what I wanted so easily. It didn’t look so easy while we were in high school. But I could see now that Trent had been right the night I’d found out she was dating Dean. I dragged everyone into a lot of dark shit because I couldn’t admit to myself this one, simple fact.

All I wanted was for her to be mine, but I kept thinking—believing—that I wasn’t enough. That something so broken couldn’t possibly deserve someone so whole.

I maintained my pace from the coffee shop where I’d been waiting, taking my time to appreciate the fact that she was waiting for me at the other end of the block. She lost her patience and sauntered in my direction, barely containing the grin on her face. When we were inches from each other, we both stopped. I wanted to kiss her, but it wasn’t time yet. So I tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and swallowed.

“Let’s go.”

We took a taxi. It was spring. It was gorgeous. The only good thing about New York City, other than the fact that Emilia LeBlanc lived here, was what I was about to show her.

“Where are we going?” She munched on her bottom lip.

“Ice skating,” I deadpanned. “Then I want to get a giant tattoo of an asshole on my forehead because it symbolizes me.”

She laughed that throaty laugh that made my cock twitch. “I can draw something out for you,” she said with a wink.

“I’d like that.”

The cab stopped on the edge of Central Park West, and we hopped out. I didn’t bring anything with me but my story. Nothing for a picnic. Not even a fucking blanket to sit on. I hoped it was enough. Emilia flashed me a Mona Lisa smile that widened into a full beam when I grabbed her hand and led her to the blossoming cherry tree near the little bridge. The tree was in full bloom. It was especially beautiful, just like her, and she stood and watched it in silence.

I’d rehearsed this moment yesterday just before I got to the gallery. Tracked my steps to make sure I knew exactly where the tree was located, and made sure it was actually blooming. Central Park was huge, and I didn’t want to mess it up. No more messing up with this woman.

She turned to face me. “Cherry blossoms?”

I shrugged. “I guess I can see what the fuss is all about.”

We sat under the tree.

The notion of telling someone everything, even her, was crippling. The lawyer in me wanted to drag me by the collar away from this. But the lawyer in me was dead near Emilia LeBlanc. Fucking her against my office door had pretty much proven so.

She looked at me expectantly before blurting out, “Listen, you don’t need to explain yourself to me. You are who you are. I knew who Vicious Spencer was before I’d decided to work for you. Knew you’d pursue me. Knew you would ask me for things I might have a problem doing. And you were right, we weren’t exclusive. As much as it hurt, you had every right to sleep with Georgia—”

“You think I slept with Georgia?” I cut her off incredulously, frowning. “I didn’t touch her. I tried. Trust me, I did. But she wasn’t you. And I know you don’t expect me to give you answers, but I’m going to do it anyway because there’s a small part of me that thinks that maybe, just maybe, you’ll give me a chance afterward.”

But there was a bigger part that suspected she was going to call the police and hand me over. Still, I had to do this.

Silence fell between us. My eyes landed on the grass as I spoke. It was easier that way.

“After my mom got injured in that car accident when I was a kid, everything changed. My parents’ marriage was never the greatest from what I can remember, but it was after Mom became disabled when we stopped being a family. No more dinners together. No more vacations. He barely even spent time with us anymore. Drowned himself in work. When I was nine, my dad finally decided to leave my mother for Josephine. They were having an affair, but he couldn’t divorce the poor crippled wife, right? So Jo convinced him to send a man to make her go away. The man was Jo’s brother, Daryl Ryker.”

Emilia gasped, and she took my hand in hers.

I continued. “I overheard my dad’s conversation with Jo—back then she was his secretary, and because I was nine, I wasn’t sure what it meant. I let it slide. Then a few weeks later, I came home from school in the middle of the day because I was sick. Saw Daryl leaving my mom’s bedroom in a hurry. She died that day, and Josephine and my dad got married a year later.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I still hadn’t gotten over the fact he hated me so fucking much that he’d left me with practically nothing.

“After what happened to Mom, it felt almost evil to be happy. And Daryl…he eventually became a fixture in our home. Like an old, tattered, ugly-as-hell piece of furniture you wanted to get rid of. He was a drunk, and sometimes a junkie—cocaine was his weakness—and he was sadistic as fuck. I was young and broken, and it was easy to drag me to the library and beat the shit out of me and cut me. I had no one to complain to. They’d murdered the only person who loved me.”

“Jesus,” I heard Emilia mutter as she sniffed loudly and clutched my hand in a death grip. Her eyes were already welling up. “This is horrible, Vic.”

So am I, I thought.

“I thought about turning to the police and telling them about the whole thing, but by that point, I knew it was me against the world. Besides, it became personal. I knew what I was going to do. I had a plan. But as I moved toward it, I guess I became hardened. Too hard to notice everything that was beautiful and soft around me.”

Enter Emilia LeBlanc. I knew what was going to leave my mouth next and I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t a terrible mistake. Emilia wasn’t my girlfriend. She wasn’t even technically my friend. And I was going to admit something to her, knowing I was putting my balls in her hands, hoping she wouldn’t squeeze them to death.

“There was a game to be played, and I played it well. When you and I saw each other for the first time, Daryl had already stopped showing up at my house. He was coked-up again, and my dad had told Jo to take his keys away. Anyway, he hadn’t abused me in a few years. I was big by then. Maybe six two, six three, and a baller. He was just a frail junkie who was losing hair, but he thought he could still intimidate me. When I found you outside the library, I thought you’d heard too much, and the worst part was, when I looked at you, all I saw was Jo. You had her lips and her hair, her eyes, and her posture. It made me want to hate you.”