Elizabeth

One Week Later

We were having dinner. We weren’t speaking.

But that wasn’t unusual for us.

What was unusual was Lukyan’s behavior. He seemed… unsettled, for lack of a better word.

He had come back much the same as when he’d left. Though his eyes were just a little bit harder, our silences lasting a lot longer. Our lovemaking more ruthless, violent, and almost desperate.

It wasn’t bad. It surpassed any one singular thing. But it signified something, something that crept closer to us with every passing day, something that told me I had a ticking clock on how long I could let my mind cage me in this place.

That told me the world was going to come rushing in, whether or not I was inside these four walls.

Tonight was no different.

It was one week after Lukyan arrived home.

We’d spent the first day in bed.

The next day we’d spent training, but he went easier on me because of my stiff and bruised body resulting from his furious touch the night before.

The rest of the week, we settled back into our routine, but he was noticeably absent for large chunks of the day, saying only that he had “business to attend to.” I itched to know more, but I knew he’d only tell me more if he wanted to.

Tonight, he was still unsettled. If anything, more so.

Though it was only miniscule things that betrayed this. The way he tapped his finger against the wood of the table when he kept picking up and putting down his knife and fork. His jerky glances toward me, not holding my gaze in his steel stare like usual.

It was unnerving.

I finally put my knife and fork down. “Okay, out with it,” I commanded.

“With what?”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re a hit man, Lukyan. You can’t feign innocence,” I said dryly.

He clasped his hands together, leaning forward on the table so his elbows met the wood.

I quirked my brow at this.

Lukyan, my Lukyan, the one who broke every rule humanity laid down as things that needed to be followed in order to have a humanity—he was a stickler for table manners. My reform school teacher’s dream.

The murderer part, not so much. But I reasoned she would likely look past that because he knew how to use the correct forks and how to fold his napkin.

He noticed my quirked brow because he noticed everything.

“I was wrong,” he said.

I leaned forward myself. “I thought it was extra chilly in here. Hell really must’ve frozen over.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. But no smile. In our time together, I had not seen one. I still wasn’t sure if I’d ever see one in my lifetime. But who knew how long that was.

“Yes, I’m aware of your amusement at me uttering such a statement, given your earlier mockings on me thinking I know everything,” he said dryly. “But to my credit, I know a lot about a lot of things.”

“But not everything?” I asked innocently, eyes wide.

Another mouth twitch. It might’ve been teased into a full-blown almost grin had it not been for the touch of dread in his eyes.

“Not everything,” he agreed.

“Well, you’re still young… ish. There’s time,” I teased.

He blinked at me a couple of times. “There is still time,” he agreed. “For a lot of things.”

There was another meaning behind the words, one I was just shy of getting.

“This is the time for me admitting I was wrong in a particular conversation we had at this very table.” He glanced at the wood as if it might hold the memories. Then he looked back up at me. “You once told me knowledge was power. I disputed it. And that was wrong. In my dealings with any adversary, any enemy, I defeat them by learning everything about them. More than they know about themselves. I’m patient. I watch. Wait. And when I think I’ve got enough information, I watch and wait some more.”

“Like you did with me?” I asked, still feeling a sting from a past, but not as crippling, since I knew had it not been for our past, we wouldn’t have this present. We would’ve have a tentative future.

He nodded once. “But I was wrong then too. Because I will wait a lifetime getting enough information about you. Knowing you. And it won’t be enough. Won’t satisfy me. You are the eternal well, Elizabeth. Never running dry.”

I sucked in a rough inhale at his words, at the ease with which he said them, and the slight glimmer of warmth behind them. Even when he said he loved me—which he’d only done twice since the first time—the sentence was encased in ice. I had to chip around it to find the warmth in it.

He didn’t give me time to let it fill me, reach my bones. “When I know everything, or think I do, that’s when I strike, defeat my enemy,” he continued, words impassive and glacial once more. “Which is what I should’ve been doing with my greatest enemy.”

I waited. He didn’t speak. “And your greatest enemy is…?”

“You,” he said. “More specifically, the part of you that still lets your life, your pain, control you instead of feed you. The part that means the outside world is lost to you.”

I froze. The elephant in the room was being addressed. I didn’t know why it hit me like it did—like a ton of cement—because it was inevitable. There was a time limit on how long I could go without dealing with this.

“I need to learn everything about it: where it comes from, what fuels it in order to defeat that part of you. Destroy that part of you. I know I said that you’re the only one who can ultimately do that, and I still agree.” He paused. “That doesn’t mean I can’t help.”

I swallowed. “You are. I’m just—”

He held up his hand. “I don’t want any more self-depreciation about weakness,” he interrupted. “We’ve had enough of that. It may be a weakness, but you’re human. I hear we’re prone to it as a race.” He stood, buttoning his suit jacket formally as he did so.

I was right, my etiquette teacher would’ve overlooked the murderer thing.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said.

I took this as an invitation to stand and I did so. I let him lead me silently down toward the basement. Mostly because I didn’t want to talk, because I was scared of what he was going to say. What I was going to have to hear. What I was going to have to face.

“The last time you brought me down here with something to give me, you had my husband, bleeding and tied up,” I commented as we descended the stairs. “Am I to expect something similar?”

He didn’t answer straightaway, waiting until we’d gotten to the bottom of the stairs, until his hand was fastened around the doorknob so he could face me.

I almost tripped on the last step, would’ve had Lukyan’s free hand not steadied me. The thing that had made me trip was the sheer volume of emotion on Lukyan’s face. Granted, sheer volume was all relative considering what I was used to, but I glimpsed something that looked a lot like nerves on his usually unshakeable exterior.

And something looking like warmth. Something that did have time to spread to my bones.

“No, it’s not exactly murder that lies in here,” he said. “At least I don’t think. Though you might consider doing so to me if this doesn’t go to plan. And there is a great chance of things not going to plan. A lot of risks. The literature is not decided on such steps, so I had to take a risk.” His grip on my arm tightened before it moved down to clasp my sweaty hand in his dry one. “I don’t normally take risks. But the payoff is worth it.” Another pause and the squeak of the door handle turning. “The payoff being you.”

I didn’t have time to answer, to ask him who snatched my cold, calculating lover and replaced him with this slightly warmer but no less calculating one, because my breath was taken away.

Quite literally.

My heart even stopped beating.

Because what had just days ago been a stark and empty room full of death and bloodstains was… something else entirely.

My mouth opened and closed rapidly, trying to alternately speak and get oxygen.

Lukyan’s hand tugged mine, and out of shock more than anything else, I let myself be led. I was standing in the middle of it before my brain gave me a chance to panic.

But the panic caught up. My heartbeat returned, in my throat, pounding at it so I almost choked. Dread and anxiety blurred my vision.

A strong sting of pain in my palm brought me back.

Lukyan came into focus.

“You’re still inside,” he reassured me.

I glanced around me in wonder and horror. “How?” I choked out.

He didn’t answer.

But I barely noticed. Because the ceiling with a couple of watermarks, and a few indications of concrete wall had me realizing I was still inside. I wasn’t out.

But I still was.

I was in the garden. Down to the tiles beneath my feet. Down to every single flower I’d pored over from the windows. The dense shrubbery, everything, surrounded me. The only thing missing was the crisp outside air. Even the stale and slightly damp air of the basement was masked with the smell of flowers, leaves, dirt.

Life.

I jumped when something flew above my head.

Lukyan’s hand squeezed mine once more, and his eyes fastened on where the colorful bird had settled on a small birdhouse in a tree that brushed against the ceiling. I knew it must’ve been potted because there was no soil to bury it in, but the way the rest of the garden was structured around it made it invisible.

Logic and fear fought in my brain, not knowing whether to panic or be relaxed in my state of limbo. This was everything that was outside, but it wasn’t.

“I couldn’t get something as rare as I would’ve liked shipped live at such late notice,” Lukyan said, eyes still on the winged creature. “Dead would’ve been another story.” His eyes went to me. “But we don’t need death to destroy for now. It wasn’t working, what we were doing in this room.”

He glanced down to the floor that was now covered in shrubbery and life, like he could see the stains, the death underneath it.

“Well, it was,” he amended. “To a point. But it wasn’t working well enough. You are not me, Elizabeth. Thankfully. You cannot learn to live with what is broken inside you with purely death.” He paused. “Maybe neither can I.” The bird chirped, and his gaze went to where it was puffing its chest, demanding attention. “Maybe we needed to see that the dead aren’t the only things that can survive inside these walls.”

I continued to watch the bird nibble at the seed in the house, entranced by the movement, the ruffling of the feathers, the beauty of it. The harmony of it.

Lukyan was right. It was surviving, thriving, in the place where only death had endured before.

I was surviving in this garden that wasn’t a garden. There was panic still, because parts of my brain still couldn’t rectify that I was really safe inside. Because I was never really going to be safe inside.

I’d constructed the illusion of safety inside a house because that meant that the fear inside me might’ve been able to be overcome. That the guilt I carried might not kill me.

“It would be helpful at this juncture if you said something,” Lukyan commented, voice flat but somehow still full of unease.

Worry.

I glanced up at him. Features blank, but still etched with something. With worry. My hand went to his jaw, cupping it with tenderness I didn’t think I was capable of. Tenderness I didn’t think he was capable of accepting.

But he just stood there, accepting it.

“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered, tears prickling at the backs of my eyes.

He cleared his throat. “That my risk paid off.”

I leaned up onto my toes so my lips could gently press against his. “Your risk paid off,” I murmured against his mouth.

* * *

One Week Later

I was sitting in the dead room.

A book lay open on my lap—my favorite book, in fact—but the enticing and horrifying words lay dormant, unable to yank my brain into the world beneath the pages.

My brain was elsewhere.

My brain was searching for that dark and ominous place Lukyan had retreated to these past days. And saying that Lukyan was somewhere dark and ominous meant something—since Lukyan himself was a creature that lived in menacing midnight every hour of the day.

But this was different. It was the way the air smelled before a storm, taunting you with the fact you couldn’t control what was coming, that you wouldn’t know how bad it would be—if it would rip you to shreds or if you’d weather it—until it was upon you.

I’d tried to distract myself with the basement garden. I sat there for hours, meditating, getting used to the feel of life surrounding me, trying to let it lay seed to the dead I’d been harboring for years.

I was doing this because I was terrified. Terrified that this onyx version of Lukyan was borne from me, from the fact I was chained to this house and he was inexplicably chained to me. I fought battles in those days, silently waging war against the thing inside me that kept me scared of a world that could offer me no more pain than I’d already experienced.

I actively engaged with people on the website I used to only lurk on. I talked to people. It was hard, harrowing, but it somehow helped. Though I had to pretend to respond well to the ‘you can do it’ chant most of them poured out onto the screen.

I hated that cheerleader, candy cane, circle jerk bullshit.

Sometimes you can do it. Sometimes you can’t.

Despite that, I found some kind of solace in the faceless anonymous strangers caught in the web of their own weaknesses.

I read. Books I’d been afraid to touch because if I touched books that would’ve been put in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble, it would mean I needed help. Wanted it.

Before, I hadn’t.

I’d wanted to sink into the floorboards in that house in the middle of nowhere and rot beside the wood until none of me remained.

Now I wanted something different.

Help.

It was asking for help that took the most strength. Withering in your misery was easier.

If Lukyan noticed my renewed vigor—which he almost certainly did because he noticed everything—he made no comment on it.

It hurt more.

So that’s why I retreated to the comfort of the dead and beautiful things, hoping they might offer something.

But they were dead.

The dead didn’t offer anything but reflections of the living’s worst fears.

So I sat.

My eyes roved over him when he strode into the room. He barely spared me a glance before walking toward a frame. It might’ve hurt had I not known him better. Had I not felt that power, that intimacy in that short but soul-destroying glance.

I learned to pay particular notice to the birds inside the frames in moments such as this, moments lingering on the edge of something. The air thickened with the approaching storm.

“It’s often the most unremarkable-looking things that prove to be most extraordinary,” he said.

The bird inside the frame was indeed lost against the beauty and color of the rest. It was small, especially considering two large birds with expansive wingspans flanked it. The feathers were a muddy brown mixed with black and gray, almost like tiger stripes.

“The New Caledonian owlet-nightjar,” he said, after my eyes had finished running over it. “Little is known about this creature, not even what its voice sounds like. There are only two known specimens in the world.” He ran his eyes atop the glass. “It took me five years to finally acquire this. It’s famously elusive to all who seek it. Some researchers doubt that the species is still in existence, after a probable sighting being reported ten years ago with nothing confirmed since then.”

He turned to me.

“I acquired this only six months before I… acquired you,” he continued.

I wasn’t going to argue with that. He did acquire me in a sense. I was just the same as these beautiful beings, except I wasn’t beautiful, and my cage was slightly larger. And with Lukyan’s gaze, I somehow came back to life and remained dead at the same time.

“It’s possible that this species is extinct because I chose to collect this one creature.” He glanced back for a moment. “Maybe. But I had to have it, you see. Because it was something the world didn’t possess. Had no knowledge of. It was a mystery to everyone. One of the rarest things on the planet.”

He took a step forward and I stood, the book on my lap tumbling to my feet. I did that because he was stalking, like he was going to crush me with his embrace. I stood not to escape that, but to welcome it.

But he stopped short.

That small distance, that definite stop, was the first breeze, gentle but definite, a sign of the storm that was about to rip through this room.

Rip through me.

“And interesting that six months after, I chose not to make the rarest, most mysterious and remarkable thing to walk the face of this earth extinct. I knew killing you would be a mistake, because then I wouldn’t satisfy my need to know something unknowable to everything else on this planet but me.”

The proverbial breeze intensified.

“It was the most important and crucial decision I’ve ever made, Elizabeth, not killing you,” he declared, as if to cement it on my soul.

There was more.

I knew this.

My body braced.

But it wouldn’t be enough to withstand the storm.

His eyes never left mine. “At the beginning of this, of us…” He trailed off as if he wasn’t ready to speak the words he’d chosen.

Dread was a snake that coiled around my throat. Around my heart.

“I let you assume something,” he continued.

He didn’t speak. “Assume what?” I prompted.

“The identity of the man who was responsible for the contract,” he said.

The snake squeezed tighter. “Christopher,” I clarified. “It was him. There was no one else. I’m not important enough to anyone else…” I watched his eyes, coming to a terrible conclusion. “You lied to me?”

He watched me. Heard the hurt and pain in my voice. “No, I let you assume a lie was the truth.”

I scoffed. “There are no subtitles or loopholes in deception, Lukyan. It’s deception, no matter if it’s by omission or not.”

He glanced down, looking almost… sheepish? No, guilty.

“I don’t disagree,” he said quietly. “But at the beginning, it was just easier letting you assume what you wanted because I didn’t plan on you being around for long enough to know the truth.”

I wasn’t hurt by the words, nor his businesslike tone. But it was that guilt, that emotion etched on his face that had me bracing, tensing. Because I knew I would hurt. Soon. Because if Lukyan was betraying even the ounce of guilt that was on his face, this deception was likely to destroy me.

“And after?” I prompted. “After it became apparent that I was going to stay a while? Where did the truth go then, Lukyan?” I didn’t ask what this truth was because I wasn’t ready for it. No, I needed the insulation of the why before I got to the what.

“Because if you got the truth, you wouldn’t stay,” he said. “Because I didn’t want the truth to burden us. Burden you.”

I pursed my lips. “So you instead burdened me with a lie, with the knowledge that you kept the truth from me when I gave you every ounce of myself, when a lie would’ve been so much easier for me?”

He clenched his fist. “It was a mistake. Fueled by my feelings for you. My love for you.”

I sucked in a breath. “Well, mistakes made in the name of love are okay, then,” I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

He didn’t reply, just clenched his fists.

“So, who was responsible, Lukyan?” I asked the question I didn’t want the answer to. That I needed to know the answer to.

“I was,” he said quickly, like it might not hurt as much if he did it with efficiency.

My heart stopped.

“You?” I choked. “But you didn’t even know me then.”

He nodded. “I didn’t know you personally, but I knew who you were. Knew you were the estranged wife of Christopher Atherton.” He paused. “And my family and I also had knowledge that he would not take another wife while his current one still lived.”

“Still endured,” I corrected. “I wouldn’t call living what I was doing.”

He didn’t move, but he continued to speak. “Yes, well, we also knew Christopher wasn’t finished with you. He had… plans.”

The words hit me like knives. Like bullets. Ripping through the flesh, the wounds that had only just scabbed over after festering for years. I didn’t need to ask Lukyan the specifics of those plans. I knew. The marks covering my body knew.

He was watching me closely, even closer than his normal Lukyan stare, like he was worried Christopher’s skeleton might burst through the door and rip my heart from my chest. He needn’t have worried—Lukyan was doing an excellent job of that himself.

“He was close to executing those plans, and that didn’t suit our interests,” he said.

I bit my lip. “Your interests being?”

“Placing my youngest sister at his side,” he said. “As his wife.”

I swallowed. “I see.”

His eyes glistened, the ice melting inside them to show me the human inside the monster.

All too late.

Much too late.

He held his entire bodily stiffly. Not the granite, definite way he held himself normally, but awkward, tense, as if he was uncertain on what to do with his powerful limbs. He was waiting for something. Maybe more questions from me, more of a reaction than the blank façade that hid the screaming pain inside me.

He got nothing.

He’d already taken everything, and with his words, he was going to take things from me I didn’t even know I had.

“I don’t have a relationship with my family, except for what I’m forced to have. I am indebted to them, but I hold no affection for them,” he said, like it would somehow make it better. He didn’t love his family; therefore, it was okay to work with them to ruin my ruins of a life. “But we work together to gain power. That didn’t trouble me greatly before. It was about problems and solving them.”

“And whoring your baby sister out to a psychopath was a solution to a particular problem?” I hissed. My palms itched.

“Yes,” he said. “And don’t trouble yourself with the notion that she’s weak, that she would let herself become victimized. She knew what she was getting into.”

I nodded, worry for his faceless sister—whom I hated without logic—the last thing on my mind. “Yes, so of course you had to take care of the weak, pitiful victim in order to get into the situation she was so sure of?”

He nodded once.

“Ah. So she’d be prepared for violence? For rape? For degradation?” I paused. “What am I talking about, of course she was, because you already knew about it. Because you did your research on me, while it was all going on. While he was doing that to me. Didn’t you?”

I was certain of the answer because I was certain of the kind of person Lukyan was. Logic dictated that he learn his enemy, his mark. But that didn’t mean I didn’t hope, pray to a God who had never existed for me, for something different. For someone different to choose this moment to come out of Lukyan and for once be good. Be the hero.

But nothing came.

Because I fell in love with the villain, and I should’ve been prepared for him to act like one, and to destroy me.

“Yes,” he said, the voice he used to utter the one word rough and full of pain.

I didn’t inspect that.

I didn’t move.

He searched my face desperately almost, searching for something. Maybe some kind of understanding. Forgiveness. Some softness, some tenderness he could clutch onto, exploit.

I may have fallen in love with the villain.

He was and always would be that.

He may have fallen in love with the victim.

But I was not that anymore.

I was the hardened monster he’d turned me into.

So he got nothing.

“I didn’t even see you,” he said. “Not once did I get a glimpse of you, during your time as his wife.”

I raised my brow. “Would that have changed anything?” I asked, picking at his excuses like his excuses were picking at the flesh that remained on my bones.

He gritted his teeth. “No,” he admitted.

I nodded but didn’t speak.

This forced him to carry on, because it was becoming apparent he wasn’t content in the silence that came after heartbreak.

“My family are much like yours, Elizabeth. My father was a direct descendant of the men who started my hometown with their blood and pain and misery. Blood and pain and misery was in our blood. It hardened, over the generations, became something different. My father made it into something different. He had businesses, friends, connections, everywhere somehow. Don’t ask me how because still, to this day, with all the resources at my disposal, I can’t pinpoint how he did it.”

He watched me, waited. Again, I gave him nothing.

“But it isn’t the how that’s important,” he continued. “Never. It is what it is. We Russians do live by that. We live by a lot of things. ‘Live like wolves, howl like a wolf.’ It’s a popular Russian idiom. I mean it to say my family are predators, carnivores. But still pack animals. Even I am somehow pulled to them, despite my desire for solitude.”

He was watching for reaction.

I gave him none.

“So my father assigned tasks for each of us in order to reach the goal. Power, the ultimate goal. Escape from the motherland, of course. The land made us what we were, but Father despised it. My task was to come here first, woo and marry a pre-chosen woman.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“A woman with connections my father could exploit.” Lukyan’s voice softened slightly, as if he noticed the change in my heartbeat.

But it didn’t make a difference to the impact of his following words.

“I did so. It wasn’t a hardship. She was an attractive and dangerous woman. Death followed her. There is nothing more to say than I was a loyal pack animal.” He paused. “And I served my purpose. The connection, her family in particular, had connections to the right people in your American government. We gained citizenship, and then we were promptly erased. From anything official, anyway. I served my purpose. My father had eyes on my wife. I had finally seen her for what she was, so I gave her willingly, gladly. Of course, I had to stay married, as was part of the plan. And my father too, stayed with my mother, at least in title. It matters not to me.”

I itched to ask the why of it. Of a lot of it. Why his mother, seemingly without debate or fight, just accepted this life that had been forced upon her.

Did it break her? Her husband so easily throwing her aside but making her stand there, at the side, not setting her free? Or was she already broken? Did she not care? Did she, like the son she raised, have an ice-cold heart, if she had a heart at all?

But then again, it didn’t really matter.

Coldhearted women and heartbroken women were much the same creatures. They lived with pain, endured it, because they had to, because it was part of them. Because there was no other choice.

“I removed myself from the plan, from the pack. But of course, he still had sway. She had sway. She’d given him instruments in order to play me. And I have no morals, no real qualms about who held the power. So I helped. I was presented with my father’s problem, and I offered a solution.”

I’d never heard him say so much in my life.

I’d never wanted to cut out his tongue more in my existence.

“You, or more accurately, your death was the solution. It was a rather simple plan. No complications. Until everything changed. Until you changed everything.”

I listened to the entire story without a reaction. Not a single intake of breath, not a muttered curse, or a scream.

Nothing.

I waited until he’d spoken those last words, and then I waited until a long time after that. Until they’d settled, ripped at my insides, tearing at the flesh to find a place to reside inside my bones.

“So what now?” I asked blankly.

He flinched. Actually flinched at my dead and empty tone. It was the voice of a corpse. If dead things could speak. But they couldn’t. So I guessed I wasn’t.

“What now?” he repeated, obviously shaken by my response, or lack thereof.

I nodded. “Yes, what follows this?” I asked. “Do you finally complete your contract now that you’ve successfully deceived me? Now that you’ve cut me open, found out how I work, ripped me apart to figure out how I stand, played with me and every single one of my broken pieces. Now do you finally kill me? I will say it’s a long game, even for you. Effective, surely. I guess I wouldn’t expect anything less. You’re nothing if not dedicated to your work.”

“You’re n-not—” he stuttered, tripped over his words in a way that was so unlike Lukyan.

But I didn’t know him. I knew what he wanted me to see.

“You stopped being work the minute you leaned over and turned on your lamp instead of screaming when I stood inside your bedroom. When you invited death in with your eyes. That’s when you stopped being work and started being life. My life.”

“Spare me,” I hissed, anger hiding the way my voice shook. “I don’t need empty words now. You’ve made sure I know how hollow everything’s been. Mission accomplished. Is it going to be a bullet to the head?” I asked conversationally. “Or will you slit my throat, watch me bleed out like a stuck pig? Then again, you’ve been watching me bleed out since the moment you stepped into my home all those months ago. So maybe you’ll go the strangulation route. You do like to toy with that. Maybe you won’t stop this time. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

I paced the room, itching to fling all the frames from their perches, destroy him like he destroyed me.

“Poetic too,” I mused. “Yes, if those are going to be the choices, then it’ll be the latter.” I gave him a questioning glance. “If I’m entitled to a request, which I think I am. You’ll give me that, no? But I guess it won’t matter, in the end. Because I’ll be dead, and it doesn’t really matter how I got there, because dead is dead, right?”

He gaped at me, openly gaped. It wasn’t a slack-jawed, unattractive expression like other people wore it. His mouth barely opened, eyes barely widened, but his whole aura radiated with something, something so human—helplessness.

He opened his mouth, as if to argue his own words, as if to argue nature. Then he closed it again. “Dead is dead,” he said finally, voice little more than a rasp.

It hung in the air, the echo of the words ringing in my ears as they sank back down into the deadness between us.

“Was this just another risk?” I asked, sounding calmer than I felt.

“Everything with you is a risk,” Lukyan said, and I found that I sounded calmer than he did.

There was no victory in this, not at that moment. There would be no victories in all the moments after, either.

“No, you showing me, letting me see that you were the one responsible for the hit in the first place, that was another experiment to get me… well, yes?” I asked. Or maybe pleaded. “To get me mad enough that I forget the overarching shadow over my life for the past year and a half and just storm outside like some petulant teenager. That it’d cure me, your betrayal?”

“No,” he answered immediately, not measuring his words, not testing the perfect response. “I admit that it came to mind when I realized what the truth would do.” He paused. “But no, it wasn’t a plan to get you to leave. If I was certain that that would be the case, maybe I never would’ve told you. I simply didn’t think that far into it.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right. The man who analyzes every aspect of his life and everyone he comes in contact with—down to his gardener and drycleaner—just failed to think of that,” I hissed. “I may have been a fool this entire time, trusting you, but I’m not an idiot.”

“You’re neither a fool nor an idiot,” he replied. “Yet I am both.”

His words rang true, as did the guilt that saturated them.

“If you want sympathy, you’re looking in the wrong direction,” I told him honestly.

His gaze was locked with mine. “I want nothing but you.”

I laughed again. “And isn’t that funny. That’s one thing you can’t have.”

That was a lie.

But I walked away on it anyway.