Chapter 6 Isla's Pov
1169 Words
I watched the video again while the world came apart around me.
My knees had hit the filthy bar floor a second earlier, yet somehow my phone was still in my hand, its bright screen throwing cold light over my skin as if it meant to display my humiliation with better clarity.
The room around me had gone strange and distant. Voices existed only as shapes. Chairs scraped somewhere far away. A bottle tipped over on a nearby table and rolled in a wet half-circle, but all of it sounded muffled, pushed underwater by the rush of blood in my ears.
The only thing left in focus was the mirror in that hotel room.
I pressed replay.
White sheets. My bare shoulder. A man braced over me. His face turned away just long enough to preserve the lie. Then he lifted his head and the mirror caught him for one brutal second.
No scar through the eyebrow.
No cold stillness in the face I had spent months hating.
A different mouth. A different smile. A different kind of darkness.
Vaughn.
The truth did something worse than pain. Pain, at least, was simple. This felt like contamination. It ran backward through every memory of that night and spoiled each one. The whiskey at the hotel bar. The black mask. The rough voice that sounded like experience and bitterness. The hands that had touched me with careful patience. The body I had chosen in a moment of fury and heartbreak. The note on the pillow. The wallet under the nightstand. Even my morning horror had belonged to a lie built with another man’s face.
I had thought I slept with the man who ruined my fiancé.
Instead, I had slept with the man who wore his brother’s life like a stolen coat.
A laugh drifted down from the booth.
Vaughn.
I looked up slowly and found him watching me with the kind of satisfaction that made my stomach turn. He had one arm draped lazily along the back of the seat, as if this entire moment were a private performance staged for his amusement. His smile had no warmth in it now. Only victory. Only the ugly pleasure of seeing me understand exactly how thoroughly he had entered my life without permission and rearranged it.
Cade stood a few feet away, very still.
I had seen him furious before. I had seen him cold, grim, annoyed and guarded. This was different. Whatever lived in his face now was closer to horror than anger. His eyes stayed on my phone, then moved to Vaughn, then back to me, like he could not decide which part of the scene was real and which part had to be some fresh cruelty his brother had invented.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
The question left my mouth broken. I did not even know which brother I was speaking to.
Neither answered quickly.
I rose to my feet on unsteady legs, one hand braced on the edge of the table. My pulse crashed through me so hard I thought I might be sick again, but I swallowed it down. I had collapsed once already.
I would give them nothing else.
Vaughn tilted his head. “You looked so sure it was Cade.”
I stared at him.
“You let me believe that,” I said.
He shrugged with obscene ease. “You were eager to. I only stayed out of your way.”
My hand tightened around the phone. “You left his wallet.”
A flicker of delight crossed his face. “You found that, did you?”
Every muscle in my body went cold.
“So it was deliberate.”
“Sweetheart, very little in life happens by accident.”
The endearment sliced through me. He had called me that in his message. Perhaps he had said it that night too. Perhaps I had smiled into a stranger’s neck while he borrowed a name that was never his and watched me build trust out of grief, alcohol and darkness.
I wanted to slap him.
I wanted to tear the room apart.
I wanted my own skin to belong to me again.
Instead, I turned to Cade.
“Did you know?”
His expression sharpened. “No.”
My throat burned. “Did you arrange this?”
“No.” He took one step toward me, then stopped when my shoulders stiffened. “Isla, I swear to you, I did not know Vaughn was in Toronto. I did not know you had ever met him. I did not know about any footage inside that room.”
His voice was rough and urgent, stripped of the cool detachment I had come to associate with him. He looked furious, yes, but beneath the fury was something rawer. Revulsion, maybe. Shock. A kind of helplessness that sat wrong on a man built like a weapon.
I almost believed him.
That frightened me more than Vaughn’s smile.
Vaughn laughed softly. “That’s his best trick, by the way.”
Cade’s eyes cut to him like knives.
“The wounded look,” Vaughn continued. “He does it beautifully. People always want to think the big damaged beast must be telling the truth. Makes them feel noble.”
“Shut your mouth,” Cade said.
Vaughn ignored him. His gaze stayed on me. “Ask him why he was at the bar that night. Ask him why he had your father’s name in his orbit long before your fake relationship contract appeared. Ask him why he was so ready to turn you into his redemption story.”
“I asked you a question,” I said to Cade, my voice rising. “Did you arrange this?”
His jaw flexed. “No.”
“That is all you have?”
“It’s the truth.”
“The truth?” I laughed once, and it sounded ugly. “I have spent weeks surrounded by lies. Marcus lied. Vivian lied. My father lies every time he pretends control is love. Then I meet you in a hotel room under someone else’s face, and somehow even that belongs to a lie too.”
Cade’s hands curled at his sides. “I never touched him in that. I never sent him. I never knew you were the woman he—”
He broke off and his face darkened with a fury that looked half directed inward.
“Say it,” Vaughn said pleasantly. “The woman I slept with. The woman you were busy turning into your image rehabilitation project. Funny little family overlap there.”
Cade moved before I could breathe.
He hit Vaughn so hard the booth slammed into the wall.
A glass shattered.
Someone at the bar cursed and stood back. A chair scraped across the floor. The whole room recoiled while the brothers crashed into each other with a violence so immediate it looked almost rehearsed, as if this was the language they had always spoken best.
- Writer
