I snap out of my thinking to look up at her. “Excuse me?” I’m suddenly filled with anger I can’t express, can’t explain.
“Camila, it’s okay, dear. I won’t out you if you haven’t already told him.” She tries to touch the back of my hand again, but I wrench it away from her.
“There’s nothing to tell, because I don’t love him.”
“Oh, dear. I see the way you look at him.”
No. She’s wrong. She’s a broken woman who’s spent too long in a nasty world of shadows. She wouldn’t know love if it smacked her in the face. And she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know the first damn thing about me.
Clenching my jaw, I say, “I look at him like he’s the man who abducted me and trapped me here. It’s a beautiful prison, but it is still a prison.”
“There’s no need to get defensive.”
I leap to my feet. The iron chair goes clattering backwards behind me. “There’s every need! You can’t go around making accusations like that. You have no idea how I feel, about him or anyone else.”
“So is it Maxim you love then?”
She asks the question so mildly that it doesn’t immediately hit me how insulting it is. A slow burn of anger. It starts in my gut and creeps out to my extremities until I’m humming with it.
“What is this?” I snap. “An interrogation? Did Isaak put you up to this?”
“Of course not.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” I seethe. I turn to whirl away and retreat to my room, but before I can go, Nikita reaches out and snares my wrist in her hand.
“I’m sorry if I offended you, Camila,” she says softly.
“And I’ll admit, when I made the statement I wasn’t completely sure how you felt about Isaak,” she says, forcing me to a standstill. “But now I do.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that you wouldn’t have gotten so defensive if it wasn’t true.”
I try to brush off the words, but they hit hard. And no matter what I do, I can’t unhear them.
Before I can work up enough courage to tell her to leave me alone, I hear the sound of voices raised in alarm.
Nikita hears it, too. And it occurs to both of us at once what it must be: Isaak is returning home.
We both whisk down the stairs, around the house, and out onto the front drive. Nikita stays hot on my heels the whole time.
Half a dozen vehicles are parked haphazardly around the fountain. Men are scrambling in every direction.
“What’s happened?” I ask to no one in particular. My heart is pounding so fast it hurts.
“Clear a path!” someone booms. “Get him inside fast. Where’s the goddamn doctor? He’s lost a fuck ton of blood.”
My heart staggers. Isaak’s been hurt. It can only be him.
“Bogdan!” Nikita calls from next to me. “Where is he? Where’s Isaak?”
Bogdan looks over at this mother. His eyes are dark and hopeless.
No.
It can’t be.
Not Isaak.
The man is invincible. He has the kind of presence that makes you believe he’ll live forever. He has the audacity to make me believe that, and then die on me?
Then Bogdan steps aside and I see the gurney being pulled from the back of the truck.
The man lying on it is big and bloodied. Big enough that the frame groans underneath his weight, and injured badly enough that I can’t make out his face from here. I’m about to go running to it, but Nikita grabs my arm and pulls me back.
More Bratva men pop down the wheels of the gurney and start wheeling it towards the entrance of the house.
It’s coming closer. A crazy thought occurs to me: what if I could just pause the moment here? Torn between the desire to look away, to be ignorant, and the desire to know if it’s Isaak who’s dying on that gurney. I’d never have to know. I’d never have to feel. I’d never have to learn what I would suffer if I’m here to watch the final beat of his heart.
But then the gurney passes right in front of where we’re standing.
I catch a flash of fair hair. Pale coloring. Huge hands.
“Oh God,” I breathe. “Lachlan.”
I feel sorrow, but it only comes after. After the instant pang of relief that gets buried under a shit-ton of guilt.
“Hurry,” someone snarls.
My eyes snap up. I know that voice.
When I catch sight of Isaak, I feel a pull that terrifies me to my core. I have to fight the urge to go to him. Because really, at the end of the day, I have no right to.
He’s not mine.
Bogdan, who’d been amongst the men wheeling the gurney up to the mansion, sighs and stops. Everything and everyone grinds to a halt.
“I’m sorry, Isaak,” Bogdan sighs. “He… he’s already gone.”
Isaak’s expression turns from dark to black. A man like him can’t process grief in the same way a normal person would. I would turn to grief and wallow in the pain.
But all I see on his face is the promise of death.
32
Camila
It’s been twenty-four hours and I haven’t even caught a glimpse of him.
I know he’s here, though. I can sense him. Twice yesterday, I could have sworn he was close by, watching me. But the moment I turned around, there was nothing there but a line of portraits staring unseeingly back at me.
I’ve walked around the garden a hundred times now. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the motive is to run into Isaak. It might be foolish, but I feel like I can sense him out here. That he’s somewhere—
“What are you doing here?”
I whirl around as my heartrate ratchets up instantly. “Isaak.”
“What are you doing here?” he asks again.
I gulp, uncertain as to why I’m so nervous right now. “I… I just needed a walk.”
“Bullshit,” he growls, walking around the water fountain towards me.
His sky blue eyes are roiling and dark. A barely-contained storm unravelling slowly. I should want to get out of the way, but fool that I am, I stand my ground.
“You were looking for me.”
Denial is the easiest route, but I decide not to go there. Not today.
“Fine. I was looking for you.”
His jaw hardens. I’m starting to wonder if his black mood has more to do with me than it does with Lachlan’s death. He’s certainly looking at me as though that’s the case.
“Why?” The lone word snaps like a whip.
“I… I just wanted to say how sorry I am,” I say shakily.
“About what?”
I frown. “About Lachlan, of course. I didn’t really know him all that well. But he seemed like a nice guy.”
Isaak snorts. “A nice guy… yeah.”
“Why is that funny?”
“You didn’t know him at all.”
“I just said that,” I remind him. “But the few interactions we did have, he was nice to me.”
“I wouldn’t flatter yourself about that.”
Jesus. Whatever I was expecting, it certainly wasn’t this. Isaak’s always been aggressive, abrasive, argumentative. But this? This is different. It’s bitter in a way that makes my chest ache.
I ought to leave. He’s looking for a reason to lash out. And I’m giving him exactly that. If I stay here, it will worsen. Escalate.
But I stand my ground.