Page 79 of Ruthless Game

The music was coming from mine.

I opened the door and gasped.

There were candles and flower petals everywhere. Sweet and beautiful. But that wasn’t why I gasped. Max was kneeling on the floor, but his eyes were dead.

“Max, what happened?” I asked, instantly worried.

“I should ask you that,” he said, voice as dead as his eyes.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, my heart in my throat squeezing so tight, it was becoming hard to breathe. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong,” he said, eyes no longer dead but so angry, the blue in them had turned to ice, “is that my girlfriend, who I loved, who I trusted implicitly, let one of my hockey rivals fuck her from behind.”

“What?” I choked on the word. “Max, no I didn’t. Why the hell would you think that?”

He didn’t speak, thrusting his phone at me.

“Someone filmed you, Emma. Don’t deny it.”

Someone filmed me? But that was impossible, there was nothing to film.

I tapped play on the little video icon on his phone, and what I saw made me want to puke my guts out. A girl that looked like me was being—there was no other word for it—fucked from behind. I recognized the guy, even from the back: Ralphie Watson, a hockey player on a rival team. And although that wasn’t me, the girl had my hair, almost exactly.

And my star birthmark.

How did she have my star birthmark?

“I swear, Max, that’s not me,” I told him. “I know how this looks⁠—”

He interrupted me. “It looks like the girl who I thought was the love of my life is nothing more than a lying, betraying whore.”

Whore.

Whore.

Whore.

The word echoed in my head.

“Don’t call me that, you can’t call me that, please Max …” I begged. My eyes burned.

“It’s not true,” I said, my voice weak, choked.

He ignored me.

“I loved you, Emma. Everything about you. Wanted to marry you. How could you do this to me? To us?”

Loved. Past tense.

“I didn’t, Max—” using his name as a way to reach him.

“Don’t call me Max. You don’t get to call me that. Not anymore,” he said, voice flat and hard. He was looking past me now. “I’m getting the hell out of here. I can’t even look at you. Not now that I know what you really are.”

What I really was.

A whore, in his eyes.

“Max, please, please, please⁠—”