“You’re not supposed to do anything, Carina. I brought you here so you could decide. If you want to go back, I’ll take you. That was the point of this trip.”
“The point? You planned this? How long have you known about this?”
“A few weeks,” I admit.
“Afew weeks?” she echoes incredulously.
“I wasn’t sure how to tell you.”
“And you think I’m keeping secrets? You justtell me, Lev. That’s the whole point of a partnership or a relationship or whatever the fuck this is.”
“We’re married, Carina. Because you ran from an engagement. You married me so you could stop running. If your family will protect you from Morello, then …”
“Then what?” she demands.
Then I’ll kill him and leave you alone. I don’t say the first part aloud because Carina has a more traditional moral code than I do, but Morello deserves to die, and I don’t trust the Carusos to handle him.
And I don’t have a chance to say the second part aloud before Carina tells me, “Not running is not why I married you.”
I wait, the obvious question hovering between us.
She sucks in a breath. Glances right, at the sandy graveyard or maybe at the waves past it. Then her gaze returns to mine, eyes filled with new resolve. “If I had to give a reason … it probably had a lot to do with how I’d been in love with you since I was … eighteen? Seventeen? I think the night you were stabbed was when I realized—you pointed a fucking gun at me, Lev! And what did I do? Run? No. I stopped you from overdosing on vodka after taking antibiotics and painkillers and whatever else. Insisted on changing your bandage like I had any sort of medical training—who does that? I was trying to … impress you, and you should have been in a hospital—why are you smiling?”
Am I? I didn’t realize.
I turn serious because this is important. “It probably had a lot to do with you saying you’ve been in love with me for ten or eleven years.”
Carina swallows hard. Shakes her head a little. “You knew.”
“I didn’t.”
I never allowed myself to consider how Carina felt about me. There was no ideal. Her caring would hurt. So would her not caring. I had nothing to offer her in Chicago, and I’ve been fixated on keeping her safe since.
“Now you do.” She ducks under my arm and races toward the water.
I abandon my gun on the stairs and chase after her. Dead jellyfish crunch under my shoes, replaced by a suctioning sound once the sand becomes wet.
Carina’s underwater, flashes of her white dress visible between cresting waves.
I don’t make a habit of swimming fully dressed, and somehow, it’s happened twice today. I wade deeper, the salty, sticky ocean steadily saturating my clothes. I’m a dutiful soldier, but there aren’t many people I’d willingly do this for. There’s only one, really.
Carina bobs to the surface ahead like a sea nymph, a look of surprised delight spreading across her face as the stretch of water between us shrinks. She starts swimming this way, her progress much faster than mine, until she’s clinging to me like a piece of seaweed, arms around my neck and legs around my waist.
“I wasn’t sure you could swim.”
She smiles at the lie, tightening her hold. “I can. I had a good teacher.” Her expression sobers. “I dream about that pool sometimes. I’m there … and you’re there. We float. You tell me not to trust anyone. You usually have a knife.”
“Do I hurt you?”
“No,” she answers quickly. “No, I know you’d never hurt me. I’ve always known that. I wasn’t scared when you pointed that gun at me, just surprised. I think the dreams were my way of … warning myself? You were always so careful about keeping boundaries between us. I tried to think the same way, to pretend we were a series of one-night stands. It worked … some of the time.”
I want to interrupt, to tell her that it was that way because it needed to be, not because I wanted it to be, but I stay silent. Let her finish.
“I made assumptions about how you felt to keep myself sane. Convinced myself you did care or you didn’t, whatever I needed to believe that particular night. And I’ve kept making assumptions because you were doing so much for me already. Because it felt … selfish, I guess, to put you in that position or to ask for validation on top of you fixing problems that hadn’t been yours in the first place. Or the ones that had been caused by me. Except now … I don’t know what’s real. What’s dream or what’s reality.”
Her eyes search my face, looking for answers.
“You asked how many men I’ve killed? I don’t remember them all. But I remember the first. Igor woke up Aleksandr in the middle of the night. My room was across the hall from his. I saw the lights. Heard the voices. I was curious, so I followed them downstairs. I must have been seen at some point, but no one stopped me. They brought Aleksandr out by the kennel.”
