As if she wasn’t the exact cause of all the hard.

My mother takes the inch and yanks it a mile. “It is. It’s devastating.” She continues as the elevator doors open in the lobby and we step out. “God, it feels like so much of the last ten years have been a lie. The baby. The baby wasn’t even mine at all.”

This time it seems tears might actually be forming in her eyes. Somewhere deep inside, there’s a piece of me that acknowledges this is a big loss for her. As unhealthy as it was to do so, she’d focused so much of her energy on her dead grandbaby. The child that would have continued her union with Jonathon Pierce. Today’s revelation had to shake her to the core.

But frankly, at the moment, I don’t give a fuck. “Save it for your shrink. I said I didn’t want to hear it.”

Meanwhile, Celia has tried to sneak away again. I trot after her, abandoning my mother. “Hey, hey, hey.” I grab her by the arm and escort her across the lobby and out the front doors. “We aren’t done. I’ll see you to your car.”

“I didn’t drive.”

“I’ll wait with you until your driver shows up.”

“I was planning on taking a cab.”

“We’ll cab together.” I don’t let her interject another excuse. “Celia, we’re having a conversation whether you want to or not. And we’re having it now, though you are welcome to choose our location.”

Her shoulders fall as she surrenders to defeat. “Cab, then.”

We hail a cab and slip in the back. I dive in the minute she’s finished giving her address to the driver. “This scam of yours, Celia—it’s not cute. It’s not even clever. It ends now.”

“I love how you immediately assume that anything I say is a scam. You can’t ever give me the benefit of the doubt?”

“I did give you the benefit of the doubt. I believed you when you stood there and told me you were happy for me. That you would give up this experiment with Alayna. Blatant lies is your trick now?”

She stares away from me out the window and shrugs. “I changed my mind.”

“And now you’re changing your mind again. Alayna is not your subject. Your experiment is over.”

Her head spins to face me. “Is there a threat buried in there? Let’s not forget that I know things you don’t want shared.”

There’s not a question of what she’s referring to. Yesterday, I could have said the same about her. But the biggest secret I had over her has now been revealed. I have little to hold over her at the moment, though I plan to change that. And fast.

In the meantime, though, I’ll have to gamble on her loyalty. Not to me—to the game. “You won’t tell Alayna that I played her. You won’t tell anyone. It’s against the rules.”

“You’re concerned with the rules? The game is over for you. What do you care about the rules?”

Her nonchalant attitude incites me. “How dare you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. How the fuck dare you?” It’s too much. All of it. Not only what she’s done to Alayna, but the insinuation that the way I taught her meant less to me than it did to her. It was my way of life, for Christ’s sake. How dare she act as though I had no respect for it? “I always adhered to our law. I did everything exactly as I said I would, even with Alayna. My only sin was to fall in love. And that was never against the rules.”

“It was certainly implied.”

I ignore her caustic remark and continue with my attack. “You’re the one who’s gone off plan. You’ve even changed the goal.”

“I changed nothing. The goal was to make her break.”

I pause, my head tilted toward her. “You mean the test was to see if she would break. There was no goal to make her.” Studying her reaction, I realize that I’m wrong. Celia’s goal was to make Alayna break. Not to simply watch what happened.

I’m baffled by this revelation. “When did our aim become to hurt people? We were scientists, not executioners. We weren’t malicious. We didn’t set out to hurt people.”

She looks at me incredulously. “You’re so fucking clueless, Hudson. We’ve been hurting and destroying people since the game began. You always pretended like that was just an unfortunate side effect, but even pursuing an experiment that might hurt someone is malicious. It’s like performing harmful research on humans. Scientists don’t do that as a rule. You know why? It’s not just unethical; it’s against the law.”

Shaking her head, she faces forward. “I get it, Hudson, I do. You didn’t want to face how fucking cruel you really are, so you told yourself what you had to in order to live with yourself.”

She was wrong. I did know how fucking cruel I was. I knew I was an asshole. I knew that, before Alayna, I had no heart.

But I had been a man with no comprehension of what it felt like to experience real pain. I hadn’t understood the damage I could do to people. Dr. Alberts had likened it to being a blind man asked to describe the color blue. While it didn’t excuse all my actions, it did make them less willful.

“It’s not the same at all.” We weren’t the same. All this time, I’d thought we were. “And the fact that you think so shows what a cruel bitch you really are.”

She claps her hands together with mock enthusiasm. “We’ve resorted to name-calling now, have we? How fun!” Her expression grows sober. “You can’t fucking be serious.”

“I’m dead serious, Celia. You will end this. And us…” I pause, not because the words are hard to say, but because I want to make sure she hears their emphasis. “We’re over too. I want you out of my life. Don’t call me. Don’t stop by. Do you understand?”

She sneers. For a woman so about grace and appearances, she can sure put on an ugly face. “It’s not that easy to just cut me out of your life, Hudson. Our families—”

And there’s a blessing about the recent disclosure of our baby lie. “I’m not so sure our families will be a problem after today. I’d bet our parents are not going to want to spend much time together from now on.”

The reminder of her parents and the afternoon’s revelation seems to shake her. She regroups quickly. “Well, we run in the same social circles.”

“And you will steer away from me when we show up at the same event. Do I make myself clear?”

Her nostrils fume, her eyes calculating. But she concedes with one word, “Perfectly.”

For good measure I add, “You do not want to make me your enemy.”

“Funny, I thought you’d already made me yours.”

That truth lingers in the air around us, irrefutable. She may mean I made her my enemy when I dropped out of the game with Alayna. Or when I left it three years ago and entered therapy. But I think instead it’s more accurate that she became my foe that summer ten years ago—when I decided to break her heart.

I’d told her she was suffering from karma. Wasn’t I as well?

We’ve arrived at her apartment building. The cab pulls over to the curb. “Farewell, Hudson. This is for good, I suppose. The taxi’s on you.”

She gets out of the car. I don’t watch after her.

I instruct the driver to head back to The Bowery. There’s just enough time to collect my luggage before heading to the airport for my trip to Japan. If it were only the Plexis deal at stake, I’d cancel. But there’s something else now, something more important. It’s time to act on the information that Warren Werner gave me about the vulnerabilities of his company, and that will begin with a source in Japan.

When I return, my energy will be thrown into repairing my relationship with Alayna. There’s been serious damage done on both our parts, but we can move on, I think. I have to believe that. Because without her, there’s no reason for anything else.

Though much is in turmoil about me, I feel oddly at peace as we return to my penthouse. Celia is gone from my life, and there’s a freedom with that knowledge that I hadn’t expected. Like a long-growing tumor has finally been removed. There will be a scar, I know. I’ll rub at it and scratch at phantom aches. But it’s gone, and, with Alayna, we can finally begin the process of healing.