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Chapter 18
My head throbs in the aftermath of Vanya’s confession. Desperate for fresh air, I retreat to the gardens.
But all I find are shadows of the past.
Grim, overcast daylight paints the landscape in a silvery glow and I’m reminded of my comfortable prison in Winthorp Manor.
Was this how Marnie felt once freed from her own cage?
Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Terrified.
Rather than learn how to brave this new, dangerous world, she preferred the one she already knew and a more familiar monster.
But I always endured Robert. Understanding him beyond his surface brutality was a chilling prospect. He corrupted everything he touched, myself included. But as a childish bit of laughter reaches my ears, I’m forced to wonder just how far his taint has truly spread.
Up ahead, Eli runs across a patch of grass, his blond curls bouncing wildly. A watchful Anna hovers nearby. She calls to him and he giggles back, so oblivious to the darkness swirling around him through no fault of his own.
Darkness one man conjured purely out of selfish spite. I know he’s behind me, even before his hand brushes my shoulder.
“We need to talk—”
“You put a target on his head.” Fury distorts my voice. I doubt he can even understand me. “Even if he is—no. It doesn’t matter. You’ve just made him the top prey of any sick bastard who thinks that he can use Robert Winthorp’s son as a bargaining chip. Was humiliating me truly worth so much?”
“No one will touch him,” he swears, and despite everything, I believe he thinks that. “And as for Sergei? You thinkheis the reason I’d hand the wife of my enemy a seat at the fucking table?”
The harshness in his tone makes me remember the role he and Sergei elected me to: a head.
“What does it even mean?” I demand as he comes to stand beside me.
“You have that power you crave, Rose,” he coldly replies. “Enough to do way more than pout in the shadows if you wanted to. Not only that, but do you think I’d announce before the whole fucking world that I have access to not one, but two people Robert Winthorp would kill to reclaim? Leverage I have yet to use. Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” He laughs darkly, revealing that it has. Multiple times. “But no. I didn’t do it for him. I did it foryou.”
“Me?” I scour the tightness of his jaw, searching for any nuance in his expression.
Downcast, his gaze reveals nothing.
“He has your eyes.” His voice is so gruff that I barely hear him. His own eyes track the boy as he races around a bed of flowers. “And that bastard…he told him about you, did you know that? He taunted him with your picture. Told him you were dead. Though I’ll admit it: I knew even before I saw him that he was still alive.”
I stare at my hands, envisioning the life ripped from them four years ago. In such a relatively short time, he’s grown into his own person. All without me.
Only someone like Mischa could clearlyanticipatesuch a reality.
“How?”
“Because I know how Winthorp’s sick, twisted brain works—that’s how. He may have resented your pregnancy, but there’s no way in hell he would deny himself of not one, buttwopeople he could manipulate and control to worship only him. And to ensure as much, he’d keep you apart and use your own longing for each other as a prison. That is the kind of man he is.”
He sounds far too confident in that assessment. In the pit of my soul, I know why: In another world, he might have done the same thing. The truly evil Mischa who would have killed Briar without hesitation and whom even Vanya couldn’t save.
“And if Eli is my son?” I demand. “What will you do now? Lock him away if I don’t support your stupid war? Threaten to sell him? No—” My heart won’t let me even consider it. “I’ll kill you if you do. I swear I will—”
“What I want?” He pulls ahead too quickly for me to keep pace. Like a storm cloud, he descends on the idyllic scene, heading right for the boy.
“M-Mischa.” Anna pales when she sees him. “Eli,” she calls, but the boy doesn’t seem to hear her.
“It’s all right.” Once he reaches her, Mischa places his hand on her back. “It’s all right.”
She looks at me warily as Mischa tries to lead her down a path. Her gaze cuts to Eli.
“It will be all right,” Mischa says.
