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My skin crawled at his touch.
“Don’t,” I said, shrugging him off.
He sighed, rolled over, and didn’t say anything else.
I heard him snoring softly a half-hour later.
I stayed awake well past three in the morning…
Unable to shake the feeling that the life I knew had crumbled beneath my feet.
157
The next day, Alistair confirmed that a ‘Lars Andersen’ had been released from San Vittore prison just a few days before.
“That was why we couldn’t find him!” my fiancé explained like it was all a harmless mix-up. “He was using an assumed name!”
“You didn’t check for aliases?!” I asked, aghast at his incompetence.
“What was I supposed to do, check every blond-haired male in the entire fucking world, dead or alive?! He was convicted under a fake name – that should tell you something!”
“What’s it supposed to tell me, exactly?”
“That he was doing something illegal, and he would rather go to prison under a fake name than let them know his real one! That’s something a spy would do – ”
“Are you going to start bleating about the Chinese again?” I asked coldly.
“If you ever find out who he was working for,” Alistair sneered, “do let me know. Oh, wait – I forgot, he won’t tell you! I wonder why?”
“Bastard,” I snarled.
“At least I’m not a fucking traitor like your former lover!”
I stormed out of the room.
I refused to talk to him for the rest of the day, even when he tried to apologize.
Things only got worse from there.
We probably wouldn’t have slept together anyways – sex with Alistair was only something I was interested in under the best of conditions, and these were far from the best of conditions – but I began to find myself physically repulsed by him. I couldn’t stand his touch, his smell, his very presence.
Every time he tried to come up behind me and kiss my neck, my body reacted as though someone had rubbed a slug across my skin.
I think it was because of the incessant little voice that kept whispering in the back of my mind:
Did he even TRY to find Lars?
Did he even LOOK?
And the most horrible of all:
Could Alistair have actually FOUND Lars if he’d tried – but instead, he took advantage of having his rival removed?
I told myself I was being paranoid. Of course Alistair had looked. He cared about me. He wanted my happiness more than anything.
…right?
At any rate, Alistair didn’t care for me rejecting his advances.
