Chapter 20: Lie Through Your Teeth
The phone buzzed against Sammy’s bare thigh, a trapped mechanical insect. Third time in ten minutes. Rebel’s grip tightened around her waist, his palm flattening possessively against her stomach where she was pressed back into the heat of his chest.
She was out cold, breathing deep and even. Peaceful. Fulfilled. He’d made sure of that. The proof of it was drying on the inside of her thighs, a stark, intimate claim he could feel against his own skin.
The phone lit up again. Caleb.
Rebel watched the screen glow against the dark slope of her leg. He didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay like this, buried in the scent of her hair and sex, until the sun burned out.
He carefully shifted his arm, snaking it from under her neck. She made a soft, discontented noise and snuggled deeper into the pillow. So fucking cute. His other hand, still splayed on her stomach, slipped lower. His fingers traced through the dampness at the junction of her thighs. He pressed two fingers inside, just to the first knuckle, a slow reclamation. She was still soft, still open from him.
She arched, a sleepy, instinctive push against his hand, a quiet moan escaping her parted lips.
He smiled, a dark, private curve in the gloom. He withdrew his fingers and reached for the phone.
“Talk,” he answered, voice low and rough with sleep he hadn’t actually gotten.
“Where is she?” Caleb’s voice was frayed, a thread pulled tight. No greeting. Just frantic demand.
Rebel’s fingers, still slick, returned to their resting place high on Sammy’s inner thigh. He could feel her heart beating there, a steady pulse against his fingertips. “Who?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Rebel. Sammy. She’s not answering. Her location’s been offline for hours. She was supposed to check in after that party in Silver Lake.”
Rebel closed his eyes, committing to the lie. His voice was flat, bored. The perfect tone of a man annoyed at being woken for no reason. “Chill out, man. Her tracker’s glitching. She’s at Shantel’s house in Malibu. Passed out on a couch probably. You know how those Malibu things get.”
He felt Sammy stir at the sound of his voice, her body shifting minutely against his. His fingers pressed a little harder into her thigh, a silent command to stay asleep, to stay his.
“Shantel’s?” Caleb’s relief was audible, a short exhale. “Why wouldn’t she just text me that?”
“Probably forgot her charger. Or her phone died. Or she’s just ignoring you because you’re being a helicopter brother. Pick one.” Rebel’s thumb stroked a slow circle. Sammy sighed, a soft, trusting sound that lodged like a shard of glass in his throat.
“Fine. Okay.” A pause. Caleb’s tone shifted, became something quieter. “Look, just… if you talk to her, tell her to call me. It’s important.”
“Important how?”
“Dad’s flying in tomorrow night. Unannounced. Wants a ‘family dinner.’ He’s bringing Martin.”
Martin. The name was a splinter. Their father’s latest fixer, a human pit bull in a Brioni suit. His presence never meant anything good.
“Shit,” Rebel said, and he didn’t have to fake the weariness. “I’ll tell her. When she’s conscious.”
“Thanks, man. I knew you’d know where she was.”
The irony was a lead weight in Rebel’s gut. “Yeah.”
He ended the call and dropped the phone to the floor. It landed with a soft thud on the discarded pile of their clothes.
Sammy turned over in his arms, her eyes barely slits in the dark. “Caleb?” Her voice was thick, raw from screaming his name earlier.
“Yeah.”
“Worried?”
“Always.” He brushed a strand of sweaty black hair from her forehead. “Go back to sleep.”
“M’kay.” She burrowed into his chest, her nose pressed against his sternum. “Your heart’s going crazy.”
He hadn’t noticed. It was hammering against his ribs, a trapped animal. A lie to Caleb was one thing. A lie that felt so perilously close to crumbling was another.
“It’s just you,” he murmured into her hair. It wasn’t a lie.
Caleb Jade stood in the cavernous, silent kitchen of the Holmby Hills mansion, staring at the blank screen of his own phone. The polished chrome of the appliances reflected fragments of the room back at him, distorted and cold.
Rebel’s explanation made sense. Shantel’s Malibu place was a known crash pad. Sammy had forgotten to charge her phone before. Caleb had teased her about it a hundred times.
So why did his nerves feel like live wires?
He pulled up the family security app, the one Rebel had personally installed and configured. He tapped into Sammy’s linked tracker. The map loaded, showing a pulsating dot stationary at a property in Malibu, nestled right against the coastline. Shantel’s address. The data log showed intermittent signals for the past four hours, consistent with a dying battery struggling to ping towers.
It was all there. Clean. Logical.
He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing out at the manicured grounds, illuminated by subtle landscape lighting. The house felt enormous and empty. A museum of their parents’ success. His father’s impending arrival was a storm front on the horizon, and Martin was the thunder.
Caleb needed his sister here. Not for his dad. For him. Sammy was the only person in this godforsaken house who didn’t make him feel like a poorly dressed actor playing a role.
He sent a quick, lighter text to Sammy’s phone: Dad incoming tmrw. Bring your A-game and your blackest eyeliner. Also, charge your damn phone. Love you.
He waited. No immediate reply bubble. Nothing.
He told himself she was sleeping. He told himself Rebel had it handled.
He almost believed it.
Back in the loft, Rebel watched the blue glow of his primary monitor. A split-screen showed the feed from the camera hidden in a smoke detector in Sammy’s bedroom. Her empty, perfectly made bed. The other half showed the falsified GPS data he’d just fed to Caleb’s system—the Malibu loop, complete with simulated signal decay.
He’d written the code himself. It was elegant. Undetectable.
Sammy shifted behind him on the bed, the sheets rustling. “Can’t sleep,” she mumbled.
He spun his chair around. She was sitting up, the silk sheet pooled around her waist. The city’s ambient light sculpted her bare shoulders, the pale curves of her breasts. She looked like something carved from moonlight and left in his bed as a miracle.
“Thinking about your dad?” he asked.
She shook her head, the black hair falling across her face. “Not yet.” She looked at him, her gaze clear now in the dark. “Why’d you lie to him?”
The question, so direct, landed between them like a thrown knife. He didn’t flinch. “You heard that, huh?”
“I heard you say I was at Shantel’s.” She pulled the sheet up, holding it under her arms. “I’m not.”
“No.” He leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking. “You’re here.”
“So why lie?”
He studied her. There was no accusation in her face, just a quiet curiosity. He could give her the easy answer. Because your brother would lose his mind. Because it’s complicated. Both were true.
He gave her the real one. “Because this,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the bed, the room, the space between them, “is mine. It’s not for him. Not right now.”
She absorbed that, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. “He trusts you.”
“I know.” The words tasted like ash.
“You’re protecting him from being worried.”
“I’m protecting this,” he said, his voice dropping. “This secret. This room. The way you look right now. That’s mine to keep. Not his to know.”
She was silent for a long moment, her eyes tracing the lines of tattoos visible on his chest and arms in the monitor’s glow. “It feels weird,” she finally said. “Hiding.”
“It is weird.” He stood up and walked to the bed, sitting on the edge beside her. He touched her cheek. “You wanna go home? I’ll drive you. Tell Caleb you just woke up at Shantel’s and came straight back.”
She turned her face into his palm, kissing the center of it. A simple, devastating gesture. “No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to be there. I want to be here.” She looked up at him, her hazel eyes holding a challenge. “With the guy who lies to my brother for me.”
He smiled, a real one this time, weary and fond. “You’re trouble, Samantha Jade.”
“You knew that.” She tugged on his hand, pulling him down beside her. “Now shut up and come back to bed. Your side’s cold.”
He let her pull him under the sheets. She molded herself to his side, her head on his shoulder, her leg thrown over his. He stared at the dark ceiling, feeling the gentle rhythm of her breath against his skin.
On the monitor behind them, the false green dot pulsed steadily in Malibu. In her empty bedroom, the digital clock ticked over to 4:17 AM.
He held her closer, his arm a bar across her back. He wasn’t just keeping a secret from Caleb. He was keeping her. And as wrong as it was, as fragile as the lie, in the quiet dark of his loft, with her warmth seeping into his bones, it felt like the only right thing he’d ever done.
His grace, and his crime, slept soundly in his arms. For now, that was enough.