Legacy of Lies (Empire of Lies 3)

I couldn’t.

The last time I broke up with a woman—over a decade ago, I felt absolutely nothing when we said our final goodbyes. She meant nothing to me and it was a dead-end relationship from the very beginning; I was only getting close to her to deliver some delayed karma to her sick and perverted landlord.

Although I can still feel several hard, uncomfortable pangs in my chest, and a painful twinge in my heart that I can’t quite explain, I know it’ll all go away eventually.

She’s no different She has to stay in the past. Forever…

Picking up my iPad again, I type in the last name of my current target—Phil Nielson, a Wall Street suit. I start to re-watch all of the short videos I shot of his daily routine yesterday, but I stop halfway through and close the file.

Sighing, I pull up the video of me and Meredith’s wedding, and then I re-watch that instead.

One more time doesn’t mean anything…

Michael

Now

Three weeks later

What the hell is wrong with me?

I’m standing in front of my latest job, a hairbrush that I need to take from a target’s hotel room. It’s a much-needed piece for a DNA test Trevor has to run by the end of the day, and I’ve been staring at it for the past four hours.

I vow to pick it up and bag it within the next fifteen minutes, to get the hell out of here, but I know that’s easier said than done. It’s ten times harder because I’m not standing in just any hotel room.

It’s the penthouse suite at The Four Seasons.

All I can do is stand still and think about the passionate night of fucking Meredith and I shared when we were here several months ago. The first time I fucked up and never truly recovered.

I can still taste her mouth, perfectly envision the way her body felt against mine, and remember exactly how my cock felt buried deep inside of her.

It’s not just in this moment that I think about her, though. It’s every fucking day.

Memories of her haunt me every few hours, and her face invades all of my dreams. The five hours of sleep that I’m used to getting every night are now down to two, and I wake up and reach for her every single time my eyes flutter open.

My chessboards have remained completely untouched, since I let her go, which is a personal record for me. I can’t seem to set up a new game without thinking about how she’s the first person to hand me a loss. She’s made me too fucking stunned to play a game against my damn self.

Like a lovesick sap, I’ve spent most of my latest days reminiscing about our better times, before marriage. I’ve reread her favorite essays—Goodbye to All That & Such, Such Were the Joys, too many times to bother counting. (I’ve even tried to read some of her favorite romances, but I drew the line once I read the phrase, “This alpha male of mine was strong enough to cry with me.” Did. Not. Finish.) I’ve flipped through the pages of her old journal, looking through the pictures she took while we were dating.

I’m convinced she’ll always be the only woman capable of turning me on with a mere pouty-lipped picture, the only one who can make my cock hard without taking off a single piece of clothing.

And no matter how hard I try to forget about her, there’s a certain set of words she said, when I dropped her off in Mexico, that keep playing in my head.

“Who burned you this badly? Who fucked you up to the point where you can walk away from someone who loves you enough to be fucking okay with everything you’ve done?”

She didn’t react much when I told her that I’d been hired to kill her, not in a way that I’d been expecting, anyway. She seemed accepting—at first, and I wasn’t sure if I was reading too much into it, but the look in her eyes before I shut down all her hopes wasn’t one of outrage or fear. It was intrigue.

“I feel like there’s a reason for what you’ve done, and you can trust me enough to tell me…”

I hadn’t paid too much attention to those words in the moment, but for the past few weeks, those were the ones that I harped on whenever I couldn’t sleep.

“So, you’re struggling to bag fucking hairbrushes now?” The sound of Trevor’s voice breaks me out of my thoughts, and I realize that he’s now standing next to me, bagging the brush himself. “I literally gave you all the easiest underlings’ jobs this week, and you’re still fucking up?”

“No.” I roll my eyes and follow him out of the room.

“Let’s get a drink, shall we?” he says, leading me to the elevator.