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She spun around like she had been caught in the act of something she shouldn’t have been up to, her blonde hair flying in a wave around her head. Her blue eyes were wide as she stared at me, wrapping her arms around herself defensively. And, when she realized who she was looking at, she froze on the spot.
"Alex?" she whispered. "What are you doing here?"
I pushed the door closed behind me, giving us all the time I could to talk about this. I didn’t know how long it would be before he came back, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him to catch us in the act. I didn’t want him to know I’d met her before; any reason he had to suspect me could have caused problems, and I needed to do everything I could to keep my head down and my focus where it needed to be.
"I have a meeting with Gregor," I explained, as I took a step towards her. She flinched away from me, pulling back like she wanted me to back off.
"Okay, well, go have your meeting," she told me, voice sharp. "It’s got nothing to do with me."
"I heard about the two of you getting married," I remarked, voice careful, trying to make it sound casual, though I wasn’t sure she would buy it, coming out of my mouth.
"Oh, right," she replied, lowering her gaze to the ground. "Yeah. I guess … I guess we did."
"You guess?” I prompted her. "You don’t sound very happy about it."
She bit her lip and looked away from me. She didn’t know if she could trust me; it had been so long since the two of us had spoken, I couldn’t blame her.
"Congratulations," I told her, and, as soon as that word was out of my mouth, her face crumpled, and she drew her gaze away from me.
"What’s wrong?" I asked her, taking a step towards her. She tightened her grip on herself, protective. She looked so thin, so weak, as though she hadn’t been eating.
"Nothing," she gritted out, her voice low. "Just leave it. I don’t want to talk about it with you."
"Do you really want to be married to him?" I asked. She turned to me, eyes flashing with anger.
"No!” she blurted out before she could stop herself. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she shook her head.
"You can’t tell him I said that, please," she begged me. "If he knew that’s how I felt—"
"I won’t say anything," I promised her. "You can trust me, Morgan. I promise."
Tears dripped down her cheeks, and I felt my heart ache in my chest as I looked at her. It was the same expression she’d had on her face in that wedding picture—as though the walls were closing in around her, and she didn’t have a clue how she was meant to stop it.
"Why did you … What are you doing here, if you don’t want to be married to him?" I asked her gently, trying to coax the answer out of her. I needed to know. I couldn’t just stand by and watch this woman get herself trapped with a man as cruel and callous as I knew Gregor was.
"Do you think I would just go along with something like that?" she hissed back at me. How long had she been sitting on this emotion, to have it all come out like this? It was clear she was barely able to restrain herself. Her eyes were blazing with anger, even as the tears shone in them.
"Then why did you do it?" I asked her, lowering my voice.
"Because he was going to come after my family if I didn’t," she spat back angrily. "I …"
She trailed off again, shaking her head.
"You don’t understand."
"So, help me understand," I urged her. "Tell me what’s going on here. Maybe I can help you out of it."
She snorted.
"You can’t do that," she told me bluntly. "That’s not how any of this works, is it?”
"What do you mean?"
"Don’t play dumb," she replied. "You want to work with Gregor. You know what he’s capable of—what he does for a living …"
"I do," I admitted. "But why are you going along with it? That’s what I don’t get."
"Because of the debts my father left behind," she confessed, lowering her gaze to the ground. "He … He told us we could pay them back, or he would hurt us. Hurt my mother, my brother. This marriage … it was the only other option he gave us to pay him back."
