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As much as I don’t want to see or speak to her, as much as I don’t want to see or speak to her killer of a best friend, I have nonetheless wondered why he hasn’t even tried to make the effort to fix things.
Is it pride? Or anger? Or guilt?
Maybe he just doesn’t care. Either way, I haven’t seen him in nine days and counting.
Aleksandr throws Bee a hopeless look and pulls his feet off the coffee table. “Listen, Wren?—”
“Don’t even think about it,” I spit before he can get a word in edgewise. “You so much as try to speak for either one of them and I’m kicking you out, too.”
He holds up his hands in surrender and mimes zipping his lips closed.
I nod with satisfaction. “Good. Now, you can show Beatrice out of my apartment.”
Aleksandr gets to his feet reluctantly, but when he approaches Bee, she pulls out a switchblade knife and holds it to his throat. “Touch me and you die,” she hisses.
We both know the knife is all for show, but Aleksandr still throws me an apologetic look and backs away. Bee struts past him and perches herself on the edge of the coffee table in front of me. She crosses her legs primly, purses her lips, and fixes me with an unflinching gaze.
“You have every right to be pissed.”
“Thanks for the permission,” I drawl.
Her grimace screws up tighter. “I’m sorry,” she says fervently. “I’ll repeat it a thousand times over if I have to.”
I cross my hands over my swollen belly. “If you repeated it a million times over, it still wouldn’t be enough.”
She throws a defeated look over at Aleksandr, who’s standing off to the side, watching this whole exchange awkwardly. “He knew, too,” she accuses. “How come you’re not as mad at him as you are at me?”
“Because you pretended to be my friend!” I cry out. “I trusted you. I really thought you had my back.”
“I do have your back, Wren. And we are friends. You mean so much to me.”
“Let’s face it: no matter how much you pretend to care about me, you’re always going to choose Dmitri first.”
“It’s not about choosing sides, Wren. We’re all on the same side here!”
“It would make your life a hell of a lot easier if I fell for that bullshit, wouldn’t it?”
She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “He’s not in the habit of killing innocent people, Wren. He regretted killing Rose immediately after he did it. He was just so destroyed over Elena’s death; he was so consumed with getting even. He thought that avenging her death would help him move on. But he didn’t get the peace he craved… not until he met you.” She’s blinking up at me earnestly. “So how ironic, how cruel, that after you came into his life, he realized that you were the sister of the woman he killed in retaliation for Elena’s death.”
I’m not gonna lie—I’ve spent as many sleepless nights tossing and turning over Elena’s death as I have over Rose’s. Neither one of them deserved to die the way they did.
Over the last week and a half, my grief has been clashing constantly with my sense of compassion. Because the twisted part is, I understand why Dmitri did what he did. And if it had been anyone but my sister, I might have been okay with it.
Well not okay-okay. But I would have been able to wrap my head around it a little easier.
I squint at Bee through my tear-studded eyelashes. “I am sorry about Elena,” I whisper. “I just can’t imagine…” A shudder races up my spine. “I can’t believe Jared was capable of something like that.”
“Sometimes, you don’t know what you’re capable of until your back is pushed to the corner.”
I shake my head. “But this? We’re not talking about taking out a second mortgage. This was murder, Bee! And he chose to do it.”
She nods. “It’s hard to accept that you don’t always know people as well as you think you do. Especially not the ones you love.”
“I’ve been driving myself crazy all week trying to figure out if Rose knew about Elena or not.” I exhale sharply. “Was she in on it, too? Was she so desperate for a child that she was willing to kill for one?”
Bee shifts uncomfortably, the coffee table beneath her groaning with the motion. “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that question.”
I close my eyes and a tear slips down my cheek. I’m actually surprised—I figured I’d used up my quota of tears for the month. For my whole life, actually.
