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So why am I still hoping he’ll crash through those doors and save me?

Save me?

What’s left of me to be saved?

Vasily’s hands grip my wrists, locking them in place. “We’ll see when he arrives here.” He chuckles, his weight

pinning me down.

“I wonder what he’d say if you carried my baby instead of his.” His cock grinding against me and the sudden nausea hits me. “What if I keep you for myself, do you think that will piss him off?”

My stomach recoils as my chest heaves violently. I don’t fight it. I let it happen—emptying everything onto him, on his face, his hair, onto myself—forcing him to jerk back like he’s been burned.

A broken, breathless laugh claws its way out of me before another wave hits, harsher this time, and I turn my head just enough to retch onto the floor.

Tears sting my eyes, my throat burns, and my body trembles with it, but I don’t miss the way he recoils.

“You fucking bitch, you’re lucky I cannot hit you.” His fingers rolling into fists. “Fuck, ugly bitch.” He screams yet it has no impact on me.

I’ll turn twenty in three days.

I was supposed to die three days ago.

Yet I’m alive.

Why am I alive?

Sergei must’ve found my letter. Is he relieved that I’m gone?

No.

He probably hates me, believing I abandoned him again. But that was always the plan. To escape. To disappear.

So why am I still alive?

Why am I breathing? Why do I feel so much pain, when I should be…dead.

Leave it on fate to deny me the mercy that death is, leaving me stranded somewhere in between, where I’m alive but not entirely living.

My life is a doomed gyre of pain and sorrow; each turn is crueller than the last.

I was this close to ending it—this close to the calm, final silence—and still, they took that from me too.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Sergei

The door to my penthouse opens again as Alec storms in, fury rolling off him like heat.

“Where is it?” He growls, his jaw ticks as he steps closer, grips my shoulder hard enough to bruise.

I’m already shaking my head.

“Already deleted it.” I reply, the tension in his shoulders eases just a fraction.

My shoulders taught, dark circles beneath my eyes as I refused to sleep four days in a row. “No information of Alina exists on the internet anymore.”

That visibly calms him and he gives me an appreciative nod, his grip on my shoulder loosening. “Thank you.”