Page 73 of Dark Soul

“Don’t you fucking dare baby me. You and your friends locked me up in a wine cellar.” She sighed. “I’d resigned myself to never getting justice for my brother. Then, several months ago, a journalist contacted me. He wants to see Kvyat in jail as well.”

Dark shook his head.

“He told you to spy on him. Jesus, Alexia, if those men had found you in that room … they would have killed you.”

He closed his eyes, as if struggling for control.

Alexia raised her jaw defiantly. How dare he act concerned now, after everything he’d done, after all the lies he’d told her. “It’s my life, in case you haven’t noticed, Dark.” She paused for a moment. “Is Luke Dark even your real name?”

He flinched as if she’d slapped him. “It’s my real name.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she admitted softly. “I was so scared they would find me …”

“Did you hear their conversation, Alexia?”

“You’re looking for it, too, aren’t you?”

“It?” he asked slowly.

He still doesn’t trust me.

And why would he?

You’ve both been lying to each other the whole time.

“Whatever it is that was in that briefcase. The man with the French accent wanted it. Kvyat kept talking about an exchange, like he expected it to happen there and then, but the Frenchman told him it would happen when he was good and ready.”

“So the exchange didn’t happen.” Dark nodded, and Alexia realized that was somehow important to him—realized also that he wasn’t going to share any more detail about it with her.

“I want to go home,” she said, then realized she didn’t have a home to go to. Kvyat’s place wasn’t home, but neither was … wherever it was they were. Probably the basement of the house the men were staying in.

“I took you out the window,” he said, his voice completely matter-of-fact. “Nobody knows you’re missing. Kvyat probably thinks you went to your bedroom after dropping the boy in his room.”

Out the window?

We could have died.

Alexia took a deep breath. This would be funny, if it wasn’t all so pathetic and if it didn’t hurt quite so much.

She lowered the bottle. Her fingers were cramping, and there was no point in pretending she might hurt him with it. She wouldn’t.

“Tell me what you want to do, Alexia,” Dark said, his eyes glittering darkly. And she had the sudden feeling that, if she told him she was afraid, he would get her out of here. No matter what it cost him.

“I want to know who you really are.”

Dark’s expression shuttered.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Then we don’t have much to talk about. Get me back to Kvyat’s place before he notices I’m missing.”

“That’s probably for the best, if you want to go back. But you don’t have to, Alexia. I can get you out.”

“You want me to trust you, yet you can’t tell me who you really are,” she mused.

“I can get you out,” he repeated stubbornly. “Back to the US, or wherever you want to go.”

Wherever I want to go …