Page 56 of No Darker Temptation

“I just can’t. Everything is so complicated…”

She takes slow, steadying breaths, her face giving away nothing. There’s no warmth in her. No light in her eyes. I’d be sooner convinced she was one of the marble statues in the alcoves than made of flesh and bone.

“I need you to listen to me. Sandro is planning something—something big. I know you’re having Saenz cut off the Walsh and Collins operations at the source but that isn’t going to stop my brother. He’s coming after you with everything he’s got.”

“Let him.”

“You don’t understand!” she huffs impatiently. “I can’t tell you who orchestrated the first hit but I can tell you that Walsh and Collins were behind the second and they didn’t do it alone. Sandro helped them. When the French coastguard interrupted your shipment it was because Sandro and I got into an argument where he strongarmed me into using my grandfather’s old contacts with Le Milieu. Ever since then our relationship has been on the rocks.”

“What was the argument about?”

“What are all of our arguments ever about? It was about you.”

Regina’s expression softens in a way it so rarely does and which I haven’t seen in years. Her hand flinches as if she means to reach out but she curls her fingers into a fist at the last second.

“I want to make a deal with you. I help you take down Sandro and in exchange⁠—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”

“I don’t need to know. I don’t trust you, haven’t in years.”

“But you used to. And I’m asking, pleading with you to find the part of yourself that once trusted me with every fiber of your being.” She inhales a shaky breath. “Do you remember our senior year at Cambridge? Our last Christmas before graduation?”

“I’m not in the mood to walk down memory lane with you, Regina.”

She ignores me. “You’d already bought a ring and did a terrible job of hiding it. As if the bottom of your sock drawer couldn’t have been more obvious. When I found it I felt so terrible for ruining the surprise that I shoved it all the way to the back and didn’t say anything for months. At graduation, when you proposed and I said yes, you told me you already knew I knew.

“I felt terrible. I thought I’d done such a good job at pretending to be surprised—and to be fair, I was. Months had passed and I was afraid you’d changed your mind about me. I even went back to look for the ring and it was gone so I assumed you were having second thoughts.” She tilts her head at me, brown eyes finding mine. “Do you remember what you told me?”

Yes.

“No. I don’t.”

She doesn’t believe me. It doesn’t matter. She fills in the blanks anyway. “You said it didn’t matter if I already knew because you trusted me not to ruin the surprise. You trusted me enough to be patient while you waited for the right time.”

I struggle with what to say. My voice is gently when I speak next. “Regina, we aren’t those people anymore. You want me to trust the word of a girl I knew ten years ago.”

“I’m still her.”

“But you aren’t,” I reply firmly. “You simply aren’t. The way I trusted you before, blindly and without condition, was because I loved you. Regina, I don’t love you anymore. I love Dahlia and before this city, the family business, and even myself I have to protect her. You put her in danger by manipulating her and luring her into your brother’s territory and now you want me to trust you? Based on what? Because you haven’t told me a single thing to prove I can.”

Regina whispers in reply, “I envy her.”

She’s half shrouded in moonlight, a mere ghost of a memory reminding me of when we were eighteen and hopeful and life hadn’t dimmed the light within us. I look at her and hardly recognize her. Regina was always aloof, if not reserved, but she was never stoic. No, in fact, she was incandescent. Charming, amiable, hypnotic. A magnetism surrounded her and a haze of mysticism always obscured the full sight of her. Like no matter how hard you looked you could never quite see her perfectly. Yet her radiancy, the hint of mischief that always endeared her to others, is gone. Until last summer we hadn’t seen each other in three years, nearly four.

How odd it is to be strangers who aren’t really strangers at all.

I loved her once. I waited for her at the altar of this church and yet when I look at her now, I feel nothing. Is she really so different from who she once was or is there something wrong with me that I’m incapable of conjuring up an ounce of fondness for the time we spent together?

“I envy the way she’s loved by you. I envy what you would do for her, the lengths you would go to for her happiness and safety. And more than anything I envy how I will never have that for myself.” She presses her lips together and returns her attention to the altar before us. “We were happy…weren’t we?”

I’m not sure how to answer her.

“Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if things had gone differently.”

“You mean if your brother hadn’t blown your cover on our wedding day?”