Bartered Betrayal - The Billionaire's Wife 08 Read Online Free PDF

there, until he had to see it. It would reach him without fail. I knew it would.
    It was ninja. Enlisting the help of Sadie and some of our other arty friends, we hopped out of Jake's borrowed truck and spirited the pieces to the middle of the square. I worked under a tarp and I asked bystanders to help me out, like one of those performance artists. People were happy to be drawn into it. Most people had heard about my crazy sculpting, my brokenhearted grief. Jake had given me some of the tabloids I'd appeared in, and much of the story had come out. My mother in particular had taken the opportunity to capitalize on my fame. I suppose that now that my father was broke she had to make good for herself, and she didn't seem to be doing too badly. She'd come to my apartment a few times, but I hadn't wanted to really see her, so I hadn't opened the door.
    I didn't begrudge her using my story to break free of my father. It's what I'd always wanted. And besides, it was a pretty good story, all the same. I knew my mother loved money. I knew she needed it. I knew that's why she had stayed with my terrible father.
    But I didn't want to be like that. I wouldn't.
    It didn't take as long as I thought it would. Those helping me were already taking pictures with their phones from beneath the tarp.
    “All right,” I said when it was ready. “Let's show this thing to everyone.”
    And they lifted the tarp away.
    The clouds had lifted for once, and sunlight fell on my creation.
    People raised their cameras and began taking snapshots. As per our understanding, I'd taken Jake with me under the tarp, and he had been able to scope out the best angles for taking his final photographs. I saw him at the front of the crowd, crouching down, snapping his pictures.
    The sculpture was big—the biggest I'd ever made—and the plexiglass box glittered and shone from the right angles, obscuring the contents. I knew, though, that when you got close to it you could see the thing trapped inside. I had it memorized, and I closed my eyes and saw it in my mind.
    It was a tiger made of water.
    I was incredibly proud of it. When I'd first seen Anton, I'd noted that he moved like a predator or like water, smooth and flowing, and I'd tried to capture that essence in my creation. Bit by bit, a huge tiger had taken shape under my pounding and pushing. It crouched in a puddle of clay, its edges blurred and liquid as it emerged from the water. One paw, claws out, reached over its head, raking at the glass box, too small to contain its huge form. I'd painted it in pale gray and black, and its angry eyes glittered  gold as it's snarling muzzle bared huge fangs as long as my fingers. It stared up at the creature atop its box.
    A rabbit. Small, lithe, and ridiculous in the face of those fangs. And yet strong. It clung to the end of a sledgehammer I'd buried in the plexiglass, gluing the bits and pieces of glass that I'd had to saw away to the end of the hammer, suspending other bits from the top of the box with invisible wire.
    So there you have it. A tiny rabbit smashing the glass box containing a snarling tiger. Words are pretty shit to describe it, honestly, so just trust me. It lived.
    “You're kind of simple,” Sadie said as she stood next to me.
    I shrugged. “What use is art no one can understand?” I said. “I think this is pretty powerful.”
    I glanced at her. She was staring at the sculpture, a faraway look in her eye. “So that's how you really feel, huh?”
    I nodded.
    Sadie licked her lips. “It's beautiful, Lis,” she said. “I'm not going to pretend to really understand your relationship with Anton, but if it makes you make art like that...” She trailed off and shook her head.
    I looked back at my piece. Yeah, it still owned. “It's definitely something,” I said. Off in the distance, sirens were blaring. Good old NYPD. Always quick to pepperspray young women making a statement. I looked forward to it. The pictures were taken. I couldn't very