Chapter 31: Chapter 31

I freeze. So does Greg.

That’s... Sean's voice.

I never expected to meet Sean again—I ran from him outside the prison when I was released, and I’ve staunchly avoided his parklands and any territories in the city that his pack controls.

Greg is smiling. He still holds my hair in his hand and he wrenches my neck backward with his grip. I yelp, but no one in the room seems to notice.

"Have you brought your fiancée here for a meal?” Greg asks. “What a coincidence! Your ex-girl is here to have a meal with me too. However, she doesn't know what's good for her …and she has agitated me.”

“Oh?” Sean replies neutrally.

He doesn’t look at me.

His hair is perfectly styled and his strong body is in a sharp gray suit. He looks wealthy and powerful and …bored.

And why shouldn’t he be?

He went out of his way to punish me three years ago, and he has no cause to help me now.

I still don’t know why he’d betray me the way he did.

If he’d been in trouble, I would’ve stood beside him.

Greg rubs at the scar near his brow. “I’m thinking I owe her from our last time meeting.”

That had been a brutal brawl between them. Sean had beaten Greg so badly that he still had those few residual scars. They were tiny. But still there. A testament to wounds so bad, Greg couldn’t regenerate them entirely.

Greg pulls my hair up, forcing me to lift my face to Sean.

What does he see, I wonder?

The girl who’d run with him for hours in the woods behind his ancestral home, where we’d make love beneath the stars? The woman who guided him on how to shape his career to assume more power from his father. Or the female who’d loved him unconditionally and vowed to mate him for eternity?

The mother of his baby?

I don’t think he sees any of those things.

Seeing him, after all that has transpired, releases a tidal wave of grief. It washes over and drowns me in memories.

And there, besides Sean… Lily Atkinson.

The woman who'd egged him on to break me. To have me cast from my pack and sentenced to a human hell-hole.

It’s a miracle I got out in three years.

If Lily had her way, I’d be serving a life sentence in that penitentiary.

Seeing them, being at the mercy of Greg, is like a nightmare roaring to life.

“Let me go,” I demand.

Greg looks at Sean as if asking his permission.

Sean shrugs. “We’re here for dinner,” he says. “How you choose to…entertain…yourself is up to you, Greg. I have nothing to do with this woman.”

I’m cut to the bone.

Although I’d long given up on Sean and had resented him for his harsh treatment, part of me believed that he’d been angry by the position my accident had put him in. Because at his core, Sean did everything for his pack. I was probably just making excuses for him, but I wanted to believe that his choices had come from some dedication to protecting his people, over protecting me.

Lily…there is no excuse for her. She’s wicked and cruel and spiteful, and when she targeted my grandfather she made an enemy of me.

The accident with her sister, though. That truly was an accident.

Sean’s eyes are cold.

I’ve never given him reason to punish me like this.

i expected his indifference, but I see now that he truly wants me to suffer.

Endlessly.

And for what? To impress his new fiancee?

“You might want to take this outside,” Sean suggests. “Ladies, you should return to your party. Y’all have a good night.”

Mia and Maria nod at him. They walk away.

Maria casts one last look over her shoulder her eyes glittering maliciously.

Sean holds out his arm and Lilly accepts it. They parade off like they haven’t a care in the world.

Like he hadn’t all but encouraged this man to rape me.

“Well would you look at that,” Greg whispers. “They left you all alone with me…”