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Alex’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, and he grinned sleepily as he lay next to me.
"You alright?" he muttered, his voice a little throaty from sleep. I paused for a moment before I nodded, realizing I was actually telling the truth.
"Yeah," I murmured. "Yeah, I think I am."
"Good," he replied, and he reached across to pull me into his arms, pressing his face into my neck and inhaling deeply, like he wanted to get lost in my scent. I wrapped my arms around him and closed my eyes tight, promising myself I would find a way to get through all of this in the morning.
Chapter Fourteen – Alex
We rode back to the city in silence, the fresh air rolling in through the windows, belying the chaos I knew we were about to see when we got back.
She chewed her lip nervously as she stared out of the window, waiting for me to say something. I had suggested we go back to the city to take a look at the mansion, get an idea of the level of destruction we were dealing with here, but she had been reluctant, trying to come up with reasons we didn’t need to go through with it quite so soon.
"Shouldn’t we wait?" she had asked me. "Till we know Gregor has stopped looking for us?"
"He’s not going to stop looking for us," I had told her gently, squeezing her hand. "But we can’t wait forever. I need to know how everything is going, okay?"
"Okay," she had breathed, and I had checked us out of that cheap motel that we had been laying low in for a couple of days and started the drive back to my father’s mansion. What remained of it, anyway.
We hadn’t talked much about what was going to happen when we got back to the city—we had been distracting ourselves with sex, romance, the feel of her body against mine, all of it. There was nothing more that needed to be said than what we were telling each other with our closeness, at least for a time. Her family had moved out to a safehouse my father had kept on the outskirts of Bianco, somewhere I doubted Gregor would go looking for them, so we only had ourselves to worry about.
"It’s going to be alright," I told her, but I doubted she would have believed me anyway. She had clearly already decided this was going to turn out to be some huge disaster, and I couldn’t blame her. The stakes were so much higher for her. If she got caught, she would be dragged back to Gregor’s home, where he would waste no time in laying his claim to her and punishing her family for what her perceived as her wrongdoings. Me? I only had my life to worry about. Heavy, but not as bad as what she was looking down the barrel of if things went wrong.
All the more reason to make sure they went right, then, I figured. I had to protect her. These last couple of days had only affirmed that for me, only secured her place in my heart once and for all. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about everything her family had been through, unable to shake the feeling that, if I had ignored my father and stuck around, I might have been able to help them stay out of this mess in the first place. But that opportunity was long behind me now, and the best I could do in the meantime was help her through this as it stood now.
I pulled the car up down the street from the mansion, or what remained of it. It took me a moment to click as to what was different, but then, it hit me. The light that normally would have been blocked by the towering three stories of my father’s mansion was filtering through with ease.
Nothing to get in the way anymore.
I made my way down towards what remained of the house. It wasn’t much more than ashes now, drenched in the dampness from the firefighters’ hoses. I couldn’t believe it. It felt surreal, standing there in front of it, looking down at what remained of the home I had grown up in, of the place that I had called home for so long, the place my father had worked so hard to build for me. It was like a nightmare brought to life.
I took a deep, shaky breath, trying to pull myself together, and behind me, I heard Morgan let out a whimper. I turned to her, glad for the distraction, if only for a moment.
"I’m so sorry, Alex," she blurted out, her eyes wide as she looked at what remained of this place. "I … I’m so sorry …"
"Hey, it’s alright," I told her. "It’s not your fault."
"Yes, it is," she protested, shaking her head. "None of this would have happened if you hadn’t tried to help me—"
"That was the choice I made," I promised her, pulling her into my arms, right there next to the stone gate we had fled through the other day. I knew it was risky, coming back here when Gregor’s men might still be staking the place out, but I deserved a chance to say goodbye to it, no matter how hard it might have been.
"If I hadn’t been here, this wouldn’t have happened," she whispered, staring at the remains of the house before her. "I can’t …"
"Hey, listen to me," I told her, catching her face in my hands. "None of this was your fault, okay? Gregor did this. He chose to do this. He chose to try and force you into that marriage. He chose to make this happen. It’s on him. All of it."
She shook her head, and I could tell she still didn’t believe me. She had taken all of this onto her shoulders, assured herself that she was the one to blame. How many other things in her life had been the same way for her? How many other things had she taken the blame for when she must have known she couldn’t be held responsible for them? She was so young, only twenty-one, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she carried a weight far beyond her years.
"I should just leave you to it," she told me. "I shouldn’t be here …"
"I don’t want you to go, Morgan," I replied, firmly, gazing into her watery eyes. "I want you here with me. I’m not going to make you stay, not if you don’t want to, but I don’t want to let you go. I don’t want all of this to have been for nothing."
She lowered her gaze to the ground for a moment, and then let out a long breath.
"He’s going to come after you again," she warned me. "After both of us."
I steeled myself. I already knew that was true. I had no idea what it was going to look like, when he made his move on us again, but I got the feeling it wasn’t going to be pretty.
"I know he will," I muttered. "But I’m going to be ready for him. We both are. Okay?"
