Scorch (Virtues & Lies 2)

“Exactly.” Freddie leans over the side of the pool table, looking at the photos of the crash that could’ve killed Cassie and then farther down the table at the edge where a small photo of the bloody scene from the same night lies. There’s almost no detail. Just midnight-glossed tarmac. Black crimson rivers and estuaries puddling the London road where everything changed. Me, Arabella, our future…

“Why didn’t she get in that car with you and Cassie?” Freddie looks up at Leo, his cheeks sucked in with the scrunch of his brow. “She’s permanently glued to Cassie, but she conveniently leaves her in the bathroom before she’s taken?”

“That doesn’t mean anything? I was there too. I left her too.” Arabella shakes her head. “You’re reaching.”

A spark warms my chest at her vocabulary because it’s a testament to the amount of times she helped me prepare for a moot at uni. Those mock trials were the bane of my fucking life at the time. Even now, thinking back, I’d take the real thing anytime. There’s a thrill in it that can’t be replicated. Holding the future in your hands is a feeling that never gets old. It’s like an aphrodisiac to life.

“She knew where we would be all those times. She knew the security measures. She knew the plans.” Freddie’s dry, bitter chuckle vibrates around us. “Tell me you don’t think it’s strange that she’s been there every single time and somehow she’s come away unscathed.”

“This is ridiculous.” Leo starts for the door, freezing when Benedict storms inside with Dad on his heels and Lucian following.

The three fucking musketeers.

The fourth one is missing though. Charles.

Heaviness blankets the already strained air in the room.

Marching to the table, Benedict throws a wad of printouts onto it. Disgust is rife in his grimace and the look he’s throwing Arabella’s way.

The fact that he’s here is enough to tell me shit’s hit the fan. But his narrowed gaze on me and Arabella has him looking ready to blow a fucking gasket or two.

Anger from our last encounter simmers deep in my gut, and I have to keep pushing it down. I remind myself that if he’s here, something is severely wrong because there’s far too much going down in parliament for him to be here for anything other than business.

“We have a problem.” Nodding down at the pile of papers on the table, he spreads them across our own.

The vision that greets me hits me right in the gut, cutting me deeper than any of my previous thoughts or assumptions of what was going on with Arabella and the Russian.

Unable to say anything that won’t make me out to be a prick, I grab the papers and turn them over only be met with a full page of obscenity.

“That’s not me!” Arabella pushes past me, collecting the image from the table and crumpling it up in her shaking hands. “We never…I never…that’s not me…”

My stomach twists, acid burning up to my mouth. Ripping the ball of paper out of her hands, I do something I probably shouldn’t. The picture is grainy as I pull it open. The tangle of limbs is shadowed just enough that nothing too explicit is on show, making it perfect for the media, but painting a scene that renders me dumbstruck with disgust.

“You have to believe me, Christopher!” Manic words break with tears. “I never let him touch me like that.”

Like that.

But you still let him touch you. Looking at her, I bite my tongue. I refuse to say it out loud in front of everyone. It would break and humiliate her further, and I won’t do that to her. This is already crushing her.

The hunch of her shoulders makes her smaller.

My gaze flits to the table, to the papers now awkwardly scattered over all the research we were going over.

A RUSSIAN AFFAIR

A BILLIONAIRE AND A GENTLEMAN

RUSSIAN ROMP

THE SEVEN MONTH ITCH

Sordid headlines blare up at me, and all I can do not to completely lose my shit is pull Arabella closer. I curl her into me even as I study the image in my hand and all the headlines strewn before me.

Freddie rounds the table quick smart. Standing beside Arabella, he shuffles the papers together, into a scrappy pile.

“I can take them all down before the evening is through.” Squeezing her shoulder, he nods at me. “It’s easy.”

“How do you propose we go about the hard copies?” Benedict barks at him, throwing down the early prints of the tabloids he was still holding on to.