Page 80 of The Marriage

Karine could feel her lungs tightening in her chest again. “I’m not exactly in a position to do much at the moment.”

“You can be. It’s a matter of more details.”

Right, but what kind?

“I won’t force you into anything, Karine.”

He hadn’t even spelled out the damn plan.

She wrung her fingers, clasping and unclasping them tightly in her lap. A thin film of sweat formed on her forehead that she wiped away with the back of her long sleeve.

Karine really only wanted one thing.

“Will I be free?” she asked.

Maxim nodded.

“In the end, you will be. Consider it my late wedding gift to you. I think you’ve earned it.”

FIFTEEN

Roman was in his loft, knocking back his third shot of vodka, and it was barely even noon. Disregarding all pretenses that he cared about what his father demanded he do, he was more concerned with taking care of himself.

The vodka was all he could allow—and God knew he needed something to numb the hell inside his mind. Roman wasn’t touching coke again, so liquor it was. Even Marky’s death wasn’t going to fuck him up. He had to stay clean.

If anything, that would have made Marky proud—that his death pushed Roman’s resolve in that regard. Enough to keep him on his phone, scrolling Narcotics Anonymous meetings available across New York.

Not that he’d tell anybody.

It was a strange feeling to be alone. Especially for a man like Roman who had never allowed himself to feel like he was alone, and that it was a bad thing. Because he had also never acknowledged that he was vulnerable before.

Getting close to people tended to do that. Caring left him wide open to getting hurt.

When his phone rang he almost didn’t pick up. Ignoring his trembling fingers shaking, he pressed it to his ear. The vodka had settled warmly in the pit of his stomach. He just had to wait a few minutes until it went to his head, numbing him for a while.

It wouldn’t last very long, but it was better than walking around with the memory of seeing Marky lying dead in his father’s driveway. It at least took the edge off his desire to get so high nothing mattered.

“Yeah?” he grumbled into the phone, scrubbing a palm down his face at the same time. He couldn’t even be sure the person on the other end heard him.

“Mr. Avdonin.” A female voice snapped him out of it. It was a voice he recognized—shit, he should have looked at the caller ID.

“This is Sylvia D’Souza, from the Twin Rivers facility in Nevada,” she said.

It was the urgency in her tone that gained all of Roman’s attention in an instant.

“Fuck,” Roman muttered under his breath, running through scenarios in his mind about what spurred on the call. It could only be a few things, and given Karine’s long stretch without an alter appearing, he worried that was the reason. If only because Katina had yet to show herself and not leave chaos in her wake. “What happened? Is she okay?”

The woman on the other end paused.

Just long enough to make Roman stand from the couch, unable to stop his sudden burst of nervous energy, demanding, “Well?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Avdonin. Your wife ... this morning ... a few hours ago—”

“Spit it out!”

“She escaped, sir.”

Roman stilled on the spot, that numbness he’d been craving came without warning, chilling him to the fucking bone. “What the fuck did you just say?”