Chapter 9

It was nearly dawn when I got back to the Ashford manor.

The house was dark. I felt my way up the stairs and pushed open the door to my room.

A hand caught my arm the second I stepped inside.

Alcohol — the reek of expensive alcohol — and a hot, shallow rush of breath next to my ear.

Julian. Drunk. In my bedroom.

He pinned me back against the door, his whole body crushed against mine. In the dark, his voice came in pieces, slurred.

"Sparrow — Sparrow — "

"You don't have a boyfriend. You're in love with me. You are. Tell me you are."

His mouth was almost on my neck.

"You don't have a boyfriend. You love me. You love me more than anything. You couldn't — you couldn't possibly be with someone else. You couldn't."

He was so sure of it that I laughed.

So he'd known, then. He'd always known exactly how obsessed I'd been with him. He'd been counting on it.

But nothing in life is ever absolute.

I drew in a breath and tried to pull back.

"Let go, Julian."

"The moment you broke my wrist for Celeste — that was the end of us. There's nothing left between us."

Before coming back, I'd forwarded Dominic's digital files to Julian's phone. I'd told him, plainly, that I was going to press charges. Against the woman he loved.

I didn't know if he'd read any of it. He was too drunk for anything to be sinking in.

He kept dragging me against him, half-sobbing into my hair.

"I was wrong, Sparrow. I was wrong. Forgive me, please. I swear — I swear there'll be no more Celeste. Ever again. We don't call off the engagement. You're still my fiancée — you're still — "

I honestly wondered if he'd killed enough brain cells tonight to have permanent damage.

This was a man who'd held Celeste Pemberton in his chest for years. A man who had insisted on her or no one.

His eyes were desperate.

"Sparrow. You love me. Only me. You don't love Dominic Blackwood. You don't."

He leaned down to kiss me.

I slapped him.

I didn't hold anything back. In the quiet of the room, it rang out clean.

"Go see someone, Julian. Get help."

I pushed him off me.

"I thought you were supposed to be dying of love for Celeste. Or was that also a lie? What, you've seen her for what she actually is and now you're — what, disappointed?"

I let out a cold laugh.

"That's all your love was ever worth, wasn't it."

Here's what I'd finally accepted about Julian Ashford.

Underneath the charm, he was a cold, unsatisfied man. He only ever wanted what he couldn't have.

The one he couldn't get was Celeste, so he romanticized her.

The one who was always there — me, his shadow, his fiancée — he couldn't feel anything for until I stopped being there. Now that I was walking away, he was panicking.

He'd wasted a lifetime on a fantasy. The "love of his life," his so-called first love — she was a woman whose true face he'd never once had the courage to look at.

There was one thing about the old timeline I'd never been able to figure out — if the kidnapping had been Celeste's own production from the start, why had she ended up dead?

Dominic and I only pieced it together much later, from what the kidnappers told the police after their arrest.

It had been Celeste's scheme from the beginning. She'd been so confident Julian loved her that she'd arranged to have both of us abducted, certain he'd choose her and I'd finally be forced to give up.

She hadn't accounted for Eleanor.

Eleanor had pressured Julian, and Julian, lovesick as he was, had caved. The night of the kidnapping ended with the wrong girl rescued.

The kidnappers, left hanging, came back to Celeste later and demanded hush money. A lot of it. She paid, because she had to.

She'd arranged the handoff in a narrow, unlit alley — somewhere discreet.

Coming back out of that alley, she'd run into a group of local thugs.

That was how she'd died.

The girl who'd engineered the whole thing had been eaten by her own scheme.

I couldn't help the grim little laugh that escaped me.

Julian and I had burned through an entire lifetime — loathing each other, tearing each other apart — over her.

Julian's head stayed down.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Whether the alcohol had burned off or the slap had burned it off, something had changed. His eyes, when he raised them, had come back from wherever they'd been.

"And if I swore to you," he said quietly, "that there wouldn't be anyone else — ever — what then?"

The sight of Julian Ashford begging me not to let go threw me, for a second.

In my first life, at the end, it had been the other way around. It had been Julian begging me to let go of him. It had been him clinging on past death — to her.

I asked him: "How do you know my letting go isn't what you begged me for, in another life?"

The room went very still.

He leaned his shoulder against the wall and lit a cigarette. The tiny orange flare twitched in the dark.

His voice had gone raw.

"If you really have nothing left," he said, "then — fine."

We both knew, sitting there with the smoke between us, what that meant.

Over a decade of growing up in the same house, he knew the shape of me. He knew I was stubborn past reason.

When I decided to love a man, I'd run myself into a brick wall and keep running.

And when I decided I was done —

I didn't turn back for that either.

At the end of it, he looked at my wrist.

He reached, a little, toward it.

I moved out of the way.

He closed his fingers on nothing and pressed his lips thin.

"Does it — does it still hurt?"

I didn't answer.

I turned around, and I closed the door between us.