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“What’s that all about?” I ask no one in particular once the door clicks shut.
“The fuck if I know,” Alec mutters, the words edged with irritation as he stalks towards the liquor cabinet and grabs a bottle of vodka.
“Did you get a picture of me kissing Elara?” Roman asks, barely looking up from his phone before winking at me.
Alec answers with a chewed-out, “Yeah,” before taking a long swig straight from the bottle. Then he taps a few keys on his phone.
A second later, Roman’s phone pings.
The bloody wanker lets out a positively devious laugh. “Dollface,” he chuckles, turning his phone towards me. “Tell Sergei I mean it in the most platonic way possible.”
My eyes land on the screen. It’s the photo of him kissing my forehead.
“Because he’s about to whoop my arse.”
The caption reads: I’m glad you’re here.
And then he uploads it.
FIFTY-TWO
Sergei
My hand stretches forward on the empty bed, and my eyes shoot open.
Not fucking again.
“Elara?”
Silence.
The single second it takes for panic to claw up my throat feels endless. My chest tightens violently as I shove out of bed, storming down the stairs two at a time.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Every terrible possibility crash through my head before I even reach the living room.
But then I see her.
Elara is sprawled across the couch beneath a blanket, her favourite show playing softly on the television as she lazily tosses popcorn into her mouth.
Her head turns towards me, and her green eyes widen immediately at the sight of me standing there half out of my fucking mind, chest heaving, hair dishevelled, adrenaline still tearing through my veins.
“Sergei?” she says cautiously. I can’t even answer right away.
Because apparently no amount of therapy is ever going to stop this. The paranoia. The terror. The instinctive certainty that if I take my eyes off her for one second, she’ll disappear again.
It’s rooted too deep inside me now, tangled into bone and blood until I don’t think it can ever truly be cut out.
Dr. Isabella says I’m improving. But it doesn’t feel better. It still feels like my heart is trying to rip itself apart inside my chest over an empty side of the bed.
Still, I keep going to therapy.
Partly because Dr. Isabella is better than every therapist before her. She doesn’t look at me like I’m broken beyond repair.
But mostly because Elara believes in it. Elara looks at me with so much stubborn hope in her eyes whenever I come back from a session that I can’t bring myself to destroy it.
I close my eyes briefly, forcing the panic back down my throat before I speak.
