Lost King Piper Lennox (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📖

He holds up his palm. It shuts me up. It feels like it stops my heart a second time.

Even though he doesn’t speak, I know what he wants to say.

The timing was coincidental, but not fucked up. What’s fucked up is that it even got to this point. My confession wasn’t a few minutes too late. It’s days. Weeks.

“Are you and Callum really over?” He stares at the table, not me.

“Yes. Don’t listen to shit he says, Theo, please. It was all stupid lies. Him throwing a fit.”

He looks up. “All of it?”

I shrink back, the flash of hope I felt going up in smoke. Theo studies me a moment, then nods again and looks back at the license.

“What kind of revenge?” he asks.

As the tears spill down my face, I sputter the starts of sentences, of truths, and feel the pain in my chest swallow me whole.

Theo grows impatient. He stands and stares me down, eyes flashing. “Were you going to steal my money?”

I shake my head.

“Film me?”

“No.”

“What, then? What were you going to do to me, Ruby?”

The tears I see gathering in his eyes should comfort me, somehow. They’re proof that this unbridled anger, the same brand I saw in the cabin when he confronted Max, isn’t totally pure.

It’s tainted with sadness. And that small thread is the only hope I’ve got that I can keep him, after all.

“I was just...” I wipe my face and force my lungs to breathe. Everything hurts. It’s not just my heart that’s broken; it’s all of me.

Theo tilts his head back, staring down at me while his eyes glisten and burn at the same time.

“...going to break your heart,” I finish.

My hands, lifeless by my sides until now, hug my arms close around my chest like I can keep all the pieces together. I know I can’t.

Not when he looks at me like that.

“‘Just,’” he repeats, then scoffs as he blinks hard, turning away and pacing to the corner.

“Not like that,” I stammer, following so I can reach for him. As soon as I grab his sleeve, he jerks away, shrugging me off. “I meant ‘just’ like…not any of the other things Callum said. That was it. That one thing, that was...that was my plan.”

My explanation fades. It makes sense in my head. In words, it hits me how awful it still sounds.

“Then congratulations.” Theo slides past me and grabs his keys from the sofa. “Your plan worked fucking perfectly.”

33

Ruby grabs the back of my jacket. I tear away.

“Theo, please, if you just listen—”

“You’ll start being honest, for once?” This is the first time in my life I’m grateful for the anger I inherited. That all-consuming, block-out-the-world feeling that drowns everything else. It’s the only reason I’m able to get my keys and start for the door, instead of listening to her.

I have to get out of here, but I don’t know where it is I’d go. My house has Ruby stamped all over it. Clothes she’s left. Places she helped me clean.

Places I kissed her, and tasted her, and made love to her until my boring, shitty life finally started making sense.

“...not like I planned to do it, okay? It’s just— Once I saw you in the hardware store? All I could think about was that video. How...how humiliated I was. How humiliated I still am.”

The mention of that video is what makes me stop and turn back to her. I couldn’t focus on anything else she was saying—but that one word stokes everything in me.

Her tone shifts, volume rising once we’re face-to-face. “And you know what? Yeah, what I did was wrong, but what you did back then was more wrong.”

“Except I didn’t do it.”

My outburst makes her step back. Her anger slips. “What?”

“I didn’t film us, Ruby. That webcam wasn’t mine.”

She blinks at me, mouth moving in silence.

The events of tonight start catching up to me. My chest feels like it’ll explode, I’m breathing so hard. I want to break every fucking thing around me. When I turn to open the door, my other hand squeezing my keys hard enough to puncture my skin, Ruby grabs my arm again.

“Don’t.” I pull it hard from her grasp. “I need to go. I can’t be around you, right now.”

“What do you mean the webcam wasn’t yours?” This time she pushes my arm, instead, turning me halfway towards her. “I found it, remember? In your pocket.”

“Yeah,” I spit, “because I tore it off the shelf the second I found it.” My hand stabs at my chest. “I didn’t put it there, Ruby.”

“Then who did?”

“Paige.” I motion behind me, as though she’s right out in the parking lot, instead of jetting around the globe on her rich, older husband’s dime, waiting out the clock on his will. If rumors are to be believed, anyway. With her, I’m inclined to think it’s one-hundred percent true.

Slowly, Ruby shakes her head. “No, Paige was my friend. She was the only person who...who was nice to me. She invited me. She—”

“Trust me, however ‘nice’ she seemed, it was all fake. She was pissed at me, so she decided to get some petty revenge.” My anger tumbles back as I nod down at her. “Guess it’s a theme.”

“Theo—”

“I have to go.” I can’t stay here. I can’t keep feeling like this—outraged and confused, looking at her and not knowing if I’m seeing Ruby or Aria. Not knowing how I feel about either one.

“No.” She braces her arm in front of her, blocking the door. “You can’t leave until I