Page 134 of Caught Between Two Billionaires
My breath catches. I want to argue with him, but part of me always knew it. “I hate you. I hate you.” The words blur together, and then I’m crying. The words change. “I love you.”
He leads me farther into the house, and I stop in front of a fireplace almost large enough to stand in. And above it there’s the Medusa I painted from the art show all those years ago.
“I should have made you mine then, Harper. You were mine, even then.”
He lowers his lips to mine, and I tilt my head up to meet him. I’m done fighting this, done destroying things, done making trophies for him to collect. And I know that he won’t push me away again, not because he’ll never retreat. Because I won’t let him. I’m not only a woman. I’m a she-devil. A siren. A mythical creature, except I’m the one who’s been made of stone. And he’s the man who turns me into flesh and blood.
The wrecking ball slams into the building, the sound deafening.
Dust rises around us, stinging my eyes. I’m not happy about the destruction. It feels a little like death, but sometimes you need to die so you can start over again. There’s a crowd behind us—our friends, Bea and Hugo. Avery and Gabriel.
There’s a community behind us.
Christopher squeezes my hand. “Are you okay?” he asks, though it’s less of a sound with the rumble still falling in front of us and a hard hat obscuring my hearing. It’s the only way he let me within two miles of the construction site today. It’s more the way his lips move.
The whole thing is coming down, along with every hope I ever had for it, every wall I ever built around myself. Leaving room for something new. I nod to him, squeezing his hand back. “Because you’re with me.” He shouldn’t be able to hear me either, but there’s no mistaking the satisfaction in his onyx eyes. It’s the same as when I wake up beside him in bed. The same as when I spread my legs above his mouth. Because he didn’t only need to save me.
He needed me to save him, too.
I reach up on my tiptoes, and he obliged by bending down. Gentle, gentle, even though there’s a wildness inside me, I tug at the lobe of his ear with my teeth. “Diabolical,” I murmur, though he probably only feels a whisper of breath. “You wanted this all along.”
And when he straightens, his eyes brim with the lazy pleasure of a man who’s recently come, his body sated, his mind at ease. “Yes,” he says, the word unmistakable.
My heart snags on something close to the surface.
Love, I think.
Through the cloud of destruction, you can make out vivid colors peeking through. Dust settles in slow degrees, the way a sun would set, crouching low to the ground and then gone. In its wake we have a full view of Christopher’s luxury condo building, with its walls of glass along the ground floor and concrete above. A woman stands proud and unashamed of her breasts, her wings, her wild mane of hair. Lilith is a demon and a sex goddess—the heart of female defiance.
She was the first woman created, even before Eve, made from the same dirt as Adam. Was she cast out of the garden for disobedience? Or did she leave in search of greener pastures?
Is she a deviant pleasure-hungry whore?
Or is she simply a woman who wants freedom?
They are the same story, depending on who tells the tale.
And in my story, she finds her own garden, in the glorious foliage and flowers surrounding her. Because Freida was telling the truth. Death is a natural part of life. And like the burning of a field, this library will give rise to new birth.
There’s more light now, with the building gone, and we’ll need those rays of sun for the garden we’re going to plan here. I can already see trees and bushes and flowers—but the painting against the wall will remain as the cornerstone. The beginning. It’s my most ambitious work to date. And it wasn’t completely a secret. It took me three weeks to paint the plants that curl up from the glass wall and hang down from giant illusory trees. It took that long with elaborate, very safe scaffolding and rope around my waist and a crew to prime the wall and seal it after.
It’s only Lilith who came at the end, working at night, with only Christopher beside me. My arms feel like jelly after working for twelve hours straight. There’s still paint smudged across my arms and shoved under my fingernails. Christopher doesn’t look much better—there’s specks of blue in his black hair from where I gripped it in a celebratory kiss, which turned into more, twenty feet above the ground on top of our large stable scaffold. There are faint lines under his eyes from being awake all night, but he looks live-wire and alert. Maybe watching for a threat since not everyone in the city is happy about the image of female empowerment painted on the building. Not everyone wants the west side to be restored. There are true demons that lurk these streets, but Lilith will help find them.
