It took discipline to see past such a thing.
It took ruthlessness to punish the liar.
After a while, I used lies to my benefit. I played games with those who thought they were masters at deceit.
I made them think I accepted their bullshit, all while waiting for a time to reveal the hand of cards I’d been steadily gathering against them. Each time I chose to prove their inability to hoodwink me, I had a winning hand. And each time I played such a game, the loser never had access to me again.
Either in a personal relationship or business.
Cross me.
Lie to me.
And you’re dead.
On paper to start with, but push me, keep trying to convince me that I was the one in the wrong, and then you’re dead in reality too.
As Eleanor slumped in the harness, her eyes snapping closed and chin crumpling to her chest, I suffered a pang of unease.
Thanks to her, I had a conscience these days.
She’d been another teacher in my life, just as my brother had.
She’d taught me the signs of heartbreak.
The taste of bitterness, the ache of wrongness, the awful, nasty understanding that no matter how you felt about someone, they could still double-cross you. You couldn’t control them. Couldn’t stop them.
She had her own thoughts and feelings. Her own beliefs and convictions. She believed them so strongly, she almost convinced me of her lies.
Strangely, it wasn’t the monster inside me who’d constructed this little game to sniff out her truth. The monster had already thrown his stupid heart at her and given her the key to every shred of trust he had left.
But the monster didn’t have an excuse. After all, it was an animal—a beast driven purely by instinct—who’d chosen Eleanor for its mate.
It was the man who’d loaded her into Euphoria.
The man’s last-ditch attempt to survive her. To prove that she was a liar. A thief of his fucking heart and the best con-artist he’d ever met.
It didn’t matter that her lies didn’t taste right or sound right or showed any of the normal revelations of a fib. It didn’t matter that I already knew she spoke the truth.
Adam Marks had heard her name from me. Not her.
Thanks to my lack of security and obsessive desire to be inside her last night, I’d caused this mess.
If anyone deserved to be punished…it’s me.
And that was exactly what this was about.
This little game wouldn’t break Eleanor.
It would break me.
And when it did…every single piece would be hers.
And she could either leave me scattered by her feet or gather up what was left and sculpt me into whomever she wanted me to be.
Because if this worked, I would be free.
Free to trust wholeheartedly.
Free to love completely.
Free to be happy.
And if it didn’t…
Well…Hell already had a throne waiting for me.
Chapter Nineteen
AS FAR AS FANTASIES went, this was a tame one.
I stood in the middle of a hay barn.
The sweet scent of harvested grass, the natural heat from fermenting bales, the dust motes shimmering on the air from the sunset spilling through the windows at the top of the huge A-frame building.
It all spoke of calm country. A slower pace of life for a city lover, and a world away from a tropical island in Indonesia.
Spinning in place, I drank it all in. Stables waited for equine guests by the large double wooden doors, a tack shed held a multitude of saddles and bridles, and a mismatch trophy wall held sun-bleached photos of someone galloping, running barrels, and smiling in victory with ribbons.
The brick floor looked freshly swept and birdsong outside mingled with the crow of a rooster and twitters of happy hens.
Without elixir fogging my mind and body, I had the luxury of judging the quality of Sully’s virtual reality.
He was right when he said he contorted the parameters of fact and fiction. Try as I might, I couldn’t spot a glitch in the illusion. Not when I swiped a hand through the air and felt the heat of a dry summer, rather than the damp mugginess of the tropics. Not when I stepped forward, my feet encased in simple lace-ups stained with mud, manure, and who knew what else. Not when I ran my hands over the blue-flowered cotton dress that skimmed my thighs with a flirty hem.
I pinched myself, trying to force my body to return to truth thanks to pain.
However, unlike a dream, the barn didn’t vanish.
I stayed standing in the centre of a farm I’d never been to before, all while my body remained tethered to some harness in Sully’s Euphoria villa.
My heart raced at the thought.
At the unnaturalness of it.
To be torn down the seams and denied access to my body.
The more I thought about it, the more panic crept over me.
I didn’t like the distance. My mind was homeless. My heart in two locations at once—the feeling, knowing, instinctual part of me existed in this fantasy, but the pumping, working, biological muscle remained in a place I couldn’t see, hear, or touch.