Something flickered in his stony blue eyes, but he said nothing. He left, shutting the door, leaving me alone in his wing of the palatial French villa.
GRAY
* * *
Hours after I left Snitch, I was once again back on our island.
Fucking shit, the island was way too small.
But Snitch’s glare followed me everywhere. So brazen, like everything else about her. I knew every thought, every curse she wasn’t hurling at me, just by her hardened hazel eyes.
Ignominious slut.
Who the fuck talked like that?
“What’s that you’ve got in your hands, Grayson?”
I stopped at my mother’s voice.
I looked at the bag. “Food.”
I kept walking, hoping that would be the end of it. The hallway was long and marked by open sandstone arches on either side, the sun fading into a tapestry of periwinkle and orange.
“You used the private jet to get that food,” she said to my back. “Was dinner so not to your liking you had to go all the way to Italy?”
I exhaled, turning to see her red-brown eyes narrowed.
“I’m not going to sit back and watch you make the same mistake your father did.”
I rubbed an eye.
There it is.
“I am nothing like him.”
“You’re right,” she said lightly. “At least your father gave me the honeymoon.”
I knew my mother was manipulating me. It was her fucking go-to. The surprising thing was that it was working. I couldn’t stop picturing Lottie, the sweetest, purest person I knew, as Tansy Crowne. My mother wasn’t born black hearted. Her heart was left out like an apple, to rot and decay.
“I see the signs,” she continued. “Living in your wing. Bringing her to parties and on vacation. A mistress or two is fine, but you’re forgetting the most important rule.”
A mistress always comes second.
I clenched my jaw. “I won’t have a mistress. I won’t even fuck another woman when I’m married.”
She smiled thinly. “You can’t be with her twenty-four seven, Grayson.”
Ice filled my veins. “Are you threatening her?”
My mother smiled, a warmth that didn’t reach her eyes. With no more words, she walked down the hallway, leaving me in the fading sunset’s shadows.
I’d planned on leaving Story alone tonight. I had to meet Lottie at Unknown. We were supposed to take pictures for our upcoming wedding, after promising I didn’t have anyone. Abigail had fucking demanded we take her with us, threatened to tell on us to Mom like we were teenagers again. So tonight the boat was already going to be filled with Gemma, Abigail, and Abigail’s dog.
Unknown was dangerous for a person like Story, someone who hadn’t grown up in my world. Forget your average everyday date raper. Unknown is filled with sex traffickers and traders—the insidious kind. The ones that promise to put you on the cover of magazines, the ones that get you in so deep you don’t even realize you’ve sold yourself until you’re famous.
The kind that live in Hollywood.
But I couldn’t fucking leave Snitch, not with my mother all but saying she’d ship her off to Russia.