Page 158 of Sin

This isn’t how I wanted to hear it.

Not secondhand.

Not through my assistant.

Not on the worst day of my life, while strangers are ripping me apart online and Jenna’s mother is saying my name like a curse.

But there it is. The thing I was afraid to want. The thing I already knew. The thing that makes everything worse and somehow gives me one small place inside the wreckage where I can breathe.

He loves me.

And God help me, I love him too.

That’s the problem because it’s the only thing that still feels true.

I close my eyes and cry harder, while Opal sits beside me and holds my hand, and Sin’s message glows on the coffee table like a match in the middle of a room full of gasoline.

23

Sin

“You look like shit,” Wilder says, dropping a bag of takeout next to me.

It’s been two weeks since everything came to light. Two weeks where people have treated me like a villain. Two weeks where every whisper in the office stops when I walk into a room. Two weeks of meetings with attorneys, shareholders, board members, HR consultants, crisis PR, and Owen, who has somehow become all four horsemen of compliance.

Worse, it’s been two weeks since I’ve seen Laurel. Two weeks since I’ve heard her voice.

Two weeks since Opal texted me from Laurel’s phone and said she wasn’t ready to talk. Two weeks since I sent back the only truth that mattered.

Tell her I love her.

I don’t know if Opal told her or if Laurel read it. I don’t know if she cried, laughed, deleted it, or decided loving me was another thing she needed to survive.

The not knowing is starting to wear on me, as my dipshit brother so kindly pointed out.

“Thanks,” I mutter, reaching for the box of noodles.

Wilder drops onto the opposite end of the couch and opens his own container. “Just keeping you grounded.”

“You’re a gift.”

“I know.”

We eat in silence. The apartment is quiet around us. It’s temporary housing in a luxury high-rise close to the office. Nice view. Clean lines. Furniture selected by someone who has never felt an emotion more complex than beige. I moved out of the house I shared with Jenna a week ago because staying there felt like living inside a corpse.

But this place isn’t home. It’s somewhere to shower and lay my head at the end of the night. Notice I didn’t say sleep. That’s because I haven’t been sleeping. Every time I close my eyes, I see Laurel.

Wilder twirls noodles around his fork. “Nice place.”

I grunt.

He gives me a look, then goes back to eating. For a few minutes, the only sound is takeout containers and the city humming beyond the glass.

Then Wilder says, “I saw Laurel today.”

Everything in me goes still.

My head snaps up. “What?”