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Of course she does, a voice deep inside Susannah said briskly, before that sad, silly part of her that always hoped her parents might act like parents despite years of never doing anything of the kind showed itself. This is about power. Everything to all of these people is always, always about power.
She’d had four years of it, and she was sick of it. More than sick of it. She could feel her aversion to the games these people played like a weight beneath her breastbone, doing its best to claw its way out.
But she refused to give her mother the satisfaction of seeing that she’d landed a blow.
“I haven’t been feeling well,” Susannah said as evenly as possible, before her mother could start in again with some new insult. “I keep getting terrible headaches. I suppose it’s possible that the emotion of Leonidas’s return has got to me more than I might have thought.”
Leonidas moved beside her, letting her know that he was paying attention to her conversation as well as his own. She instantly regretted using the word emotion where he could hear it. And she hated that she was holding on to him in the first place. She’d been handling far more intense scenes than this all by herself for years. He didn’t need to do anything to support her.
But before she could put the distance between them she should have, he shifted where he stood and then slid his hand to the small of her back as if they weren’t strangers who happened to be married to each other, but a unit.
Suddenly Susannah was afraid of the emotions she could feel slopping around inside her as if they might flood her, then carry her away, if she gave in to a single one of them.
She needed to stop this. She needed to escape this gilded, vicious world while she still could.
And she needed to leave soon, before she forgot the way out.
Something in her whispered that the line was coming faster than she wanted to admit—and if she wasn’t careful, she’d cross it without realizing it.
“Resurrection is a tricky business,” Leonidas was saying to her mother, merging their two conversations into one.
“It could be that, I suppose,” Annemieke said with a sniff. “Though Susannah has never been a sickly thing, all fainting spells and fragility.”
“This is where she calls me ‘sturdy,’ which is never a compliment,” Susannah murmured, not quite under her breath.
Annemieke swept a look over her daughter, from her head all the way to her toes and then back again, in that pointedly judgmental way that always left Susannah feeling lacking. More than lacking.
Susannah reminded herself that she didn’t send time with her parents for a reason. After tonight it would likely be months and months before she had to face them again and by then, who knew where she’d be? If she was divorced from Leonidas the way she planned, it was entirely likely that her parents would want nothing to do with her.
If she kept that happy day in mind, tonight didn’t seem so bad. And there was no point indulging the part of her that went a bit too still at the notion of leaving Leonidas when she could feel all that warmth and strength from the hand he held at her back. No point at all.
She made herself smile. “It’s only a little headache now and then,” she said. “I’m sure I just need to drink more water.”
“I only suffered from headaches once and it was very unpleasant.” Her mother lifted a brow, and there was a gleam in the blue eyes she’d passed on to her daughter that Susannah did not like at all. “It was when I was pregnant.”
And Susannah didn’t hear if there was any conversation after that point, because everything seemed to…stop. Leonidas went very, very still beside her. His hand didn’t move, and she suddenly felt it less as moral support and more like a threat. A terrible threat she should have heeded from the start.
A dark foreboding she wanted to reject swept over her. But she couldn’t seem to speak, not even to deny what she knew—she knew—was completely false.
Especially not when she could feel all that lethal power emanating from the man beside her. The husband who had agreed to let her leave—but he was a Betancur. There wasn’t a Betancur in six generations who’d been laissez faire about the family bloodline, and somehow she very much doubted that Leonidas would be the first.
Not that she was pregnant, of course, because she couldn’t be.
She couldn’t be.
“I’m nothing like my mother,” she told him fiercely when he made their excuses in a gruff tone and led her away, his hand wrapped tight around her upper arm as if he expected her to bolt. “I never have been. I don’t even look like her. It’s ridiculous to assume that we would share anything.”
