Liesel looks at me with a fierceness in her eyes. She’s about to try and use the knife on me because she’s pissed I won. That I got in her head and got me to kiss her.
Just like I knew she would, she throws her arms up, trying to strike me with the knife in the neck. But I catch her wrist and hold the knife suspended in the air between us.
Her face is locked on mine. She’s trying to be a shell. She’s trying to keep her emotions off her face, but I notice the lift of her lips in a hint of a smile before her lip quivers, and her eyes widen.
“Please,” she trembles.
My eyes search hers for answers. Why did she just flip a switch? How did she go from lust to anger to fear in three seconds?
“Get your hands off my wife,” Waylon says from behind me.
And then Liesel can’t keep the smirk off her face. It flashes for only a second. Only long enough for me to notice, but not long enough for Waylon to see it.
She got the knife to frame me.
She asked me to kiss her to force me close, so that in Waylon’s eyes, it looks like I’m attacking her.
I have a decision to make. Do I let her win—go and walk out the door? Or do I fight back?
Liesel knows that if I wanted to take down Waylon right now, I could. Did she just sign Waylon’s death sentence, all for a chance to beat me?
“We aren’t finished. I’ll let you win this round, but I still want answers. And your time is running out. You have twenty-four hours to decide if you want to finish the game here or back on my island. But remember whom you are risking if you choose to finish our game here,” I whisper so only she can hear.
I let go of her arm.
I half expect when I turn around for Waylon to have a gun pointed at my head. For him to be holding a bat, something.
Instead, he’s standing there in a suit. His graying hair is slicked back, and there is a drop of blood on his jawline from where he cut himself shaving.
“I called the police. Get out if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in jail,” Waylon says.
I shake my head. Lawyers—they are all the same. Cocky smart-alecks who think the police will step in and save them. They don’t know that if the police showed up, they’d just look the other way as soon as I paid them off or whispered my name.
The only thing protecting Waylon right now is that I want to know who Waylon truly is to Liesel before I kill him. Whether he’s truly her husband, the love of her life, or just a man she fucks because she’s lonely. I’ll figure it out.
I don’t speak as I walk out the door like a stranger back into the night. The man isn’t worth my words.
The door slams behind me. A heaviness weighs me down as I ride the elevator down.
Wife.
Waylon called Liesel his wife.
She had to have warned him before I got here to call her that, to pretend they are married. Right?
Liesel Dunn can’t be married.
Can’t. Be.
My steel heart hardens. It won’t break. It won’t even crack. Not for her.
Liesel may think Waylon calling her his wife is confirmation that she’s married, but it’s not. I want her to tell me the truth. Sure, I could look up her marriage license with the city, but what fun is that?
No, after her little stunt, I’m going to pull every truth I can from her, until the truth kills her.
5
Liesel