Chapter Forty-Five

Damien's POV

“She’s dead,” Katarina said to me after I asked her what had happened to Lauren and where she was, and her tears were flowing freely as she looked at me and gave me a pleading look.

I was perfect at detecting lies, but it was hard to know what this one was. One thing I knew was that it couldn’t possibly be true. Lauren could not be dead. Things just didn’t work that way.

“Stop messing around, Kate. This is not something you should be joking about. If you think for one second that I’m not going to pull the trigger, then you are surely mistaken,” I informed her, but that was just my way of letting her tell me the truth one more time so that it would sink in as it hadn’t.

“None of this would have happened if you truly loved me, Damien,” she sobbed, but I didn’t care about any of that. “I made a small mistake that could have been fixed if we had just talked, but you walked away from me without listening to my side of the story.”

“Katarina!” I