Scandalise Me. Caitlin Crews

his family, his friends, both football teams he’d played for in his career, all of his fans. He’d squandered each and every gift he’d ever been given. He’d let the only girl he’d ever loved walk away from him, straight into the hands of a monster, and he hadn’t noticed anything but his own pain and jealousy.

      And he knew these were the least of his sins.

      Because he still remembered every moment of that night ten years ago, at the annual Christmas party at Austin’s father’s law firm. How Sarah had come to him with all that dark pain on her face and he had liked it.

      Can I talk to you? she’d asked. Please?

      Maybe later, he’d said, making such a show of not caring, of hardly paying attention to her. This is a big night.

      It was about time she’d felt some of what he was feeling, he’d thought. He’d liked that she looked lost and scared and tentative, all things Sarah Michaels had never been. He’d assumed that she was finally recognizing what a huge mistake she’d made in breaking up with him. He’d thought it was so ironic that he’d been entirely faithful to Sarah even though he was the professional athlete—that she’d been the one to cheat on him, and with Austin’s father, no less.

      He’d been so smugly certain he was the victim. So self-righteous that Sarah had done this terrible thing and he—out of respect for who she’d been back in college, he’d told himself piously—had opted to keep it to himself. Because he was such a great guy.

      And because he was all things petty, because he’d thought that shattered look on her face—all about him, he’d been so certain—wasn’t quite enough, he’d taken the whole thing a step further and asked the bimbo he’d been parading around on his arm to marry him, right there in the middle of the Christmas party in all of the elegance and old-money sparkle Treffen, Smith, and Howell claimed as its own.

      He’d watched Sarah leave the room as the champagne was popped, looking small and beaten, and all these years later he was still ashamed of how deeply satisfied he’d felt then. He’d had no idea that that would be the last time he’d ever see her. That he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if, had he known he’d never lay eyes on Sarah alive again, he might have done something differently.

      One shade up from sociopathic, Zoe Brook had said. She had no idea how right she was.

      Then again, if she knew about Sarah, maybe she did.

      * * *

      Zoe didn’t take a full breath until she shut her apartment door late that night, cutting herself off from the world at last. She tugged off her boots in her entry hall and padded barefoot into the apartment that ambled over the whole of the third floor of a prewar brownstone on the Upper West Side.

      She let herself breathe in deep as she moved through the living room with its commotion of bright colors, letting her Tough Bitch Mask drop away. Here at home, she was someone else. Here, she was the Zoe she might have been.

      The Zoe who hadn’t been ruined.

      She moved into her bathroom as she stripped out of her work clothes, headed for the pretty claw-footed tub perched on the black-and-white checkerboard tiled floor. She turned on the water and poured in a sachet of her favorite bath salts, letting the lavender scent work on her.

      There was more Jason Treffen in her head than usual tonight, and it made her edgy.

      Her interaction with Hunter Grant this morning hadn’t helped. The thing was, she’d wanted to touch him again, standing there in the middle of a strip club, of all places. She’d wanted to touch him, and that didn’t make sense. Not for her.

      Her skin felt itchy. New. As if it wasn’t hers any longer. And that strange notion threw her right back into the past.

      Her grandparents had raised her grudgingly after her own parents took off, reminding her daily that they were doing no more than their Christian duty. And that was exactly what they’d done. She’d grown up in the high desert of southern California, whole worlds and a long drive away from glamorous Los Angeles. It had been bitterly cold in the winter, brutally hot in the summer, and there was always that unsettling desert wind, sweeping down from the stark, brown mountains to keep everyone on edge.

      Zoe had tried her best to love her grandparents and their pinched-mouthed charity they’d never allowed her to forget would end the day she turned eighteen. She’d tried. School hadn’t come easily to her, but she’d applied herself and excelled her way into a scholarship—because she’d had no other choice if she wanted to escape.

      When she met Jason Treffen at a scholarship student function her senior year at Cornell, he was charming and kind. He understood. And because he did, when he offered to help her, she let him.

      She still couldn’t forgive herself for that.

      He’d paid off her student loans because, he said, he knew promise when he saw it. He’d hired her as a legal assistant at his very upscale law firm in New York City, and Zoe had been so grateful. For the first time in her life, she’d felt cared for. Pampered, even. As if she’d been worthy of love after all, despite her grandparents.

      It wasn’t until the second time Jason asked her to go out to dinner with a friend of his—because the old guy was lonely and Zoe was a pretty girl who could be friendly, couldn’t she?—that she got that sick feeling in her gut. It wasn’t until one or two more “favors” ended with increasingly intense negotiations for sex that Jason suggested later she should have accepted, that she finally understood. That she finally saw the wolf in his gleaming sheep’s robes.

      But by then, of course, she was trapped. Jason was good at what he did. And even better at punishing the girls who didn’t play along. He was rich and powerful and connected, and, as he told her repeatedly, no one would believe her anyway.

      It took Zoe three long, horrible years to buy her freedom. She watched other girls give in. To drugs, to despair. She almost wavered herself—it was so hard, and she was so alone, and did she really think she could beat a powerful man such as Jason at his own game?—but then her friend Sarah had taken her own life.

      And that had changed everything.

      Zoe had understood she had to escape. She had to. Or all of it—Sarah’s death, what she’d suffered those terrible years, what had happened to the other girls—would have been in vain.

      She had to escape, or Jason won.

      Zoe twisted her long black hair into a messy knot on the top of her head now, and tested the water in the bath, letting it run through her fingers. And it all rushed back. It flooded into her, demanding her surrender, the way it always did.

      Insisting she remember everything.

      Do you really believe you can run away from me? Jason had laughed at her that last day in his dark wood office so high above the city, when she’d thrown her hard-earned check down in front of him and told him she was done. Leaving. Free at last. I plucked you from obscurity. You don’t have anything I didn’t give you, and you never will. Remember that.

      You made me a whore, she’d thrown at him, hatred and terror and disgust making her voice too thick. Too obvious.

      Whores generally close the deal. He’d looked so pleased with himself. So smug. Not in the least bit concerned that she was getting out from under his thumb. That’s the point of whores. What you do is play dangerous games. You’re lucky there are so many men who enjoy paying for the privilege of that kind of tease.

      But she’d had one or two nights that had tipped over that edge, hadn’t she? When they’d simply taken what they wanted. And the way he’d looked at her then, she knew that he knew it.

      Yes, she’d hissed at him. Lucky is exactly how I feel. I’m overcome with gratitude.

      You will be, he’d assured her.

      Years had passed and she still couldn’t get the ring of his laughter out of her ears, erase that vicious smile from her memory.

      Hello,