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I sit up slightly and stare at him. “Freedom is an illusion that gets men like you killed and women like me sold.”
He shakes his head, and he actually looks like he feels sorry for me. “You’ve been spoon-fed one lie after another, Alice, until you have no other choice but to believe that’s the truth. I just…fuck, I just want to set you free. I want to set us both free.”
I shake my head and fight the urge to put a protective hand over my belly. “I can’t stop what’s already happened.”
“I know. But I can promise you it doesn’t have to be this way. All I’m asking is for a chance.”
“And if you come back and I say no?”
He bows his head. “Then you say no, and I’ll deal with those consequences. But I promise that I will never lie to you, and I will never hide what they’ve done.”
Kane told me that none of them were the ones who killed my mother and my sister. Kane blames himself for setting my father off on a mad spiral—but if it wasn’t Kane, it would have been another person that triggered it.
The only thing I don’t have is proof, and that’s exactly what Leo’s promising me.
“I was the only one who ever tried to help you,” Leo reminds me. “I taught you how to fight, and I took hits for you so you could go to school. Alice, I wouldn’t have done any of that if your future wasn’t important to me.”
I still don’t trust him, but I also realize that I’ve been dragged from one mess to another, and no one has offered me answers. “You have ten minutes to get the hell out of here unseen. If they find you, I won’t stop whatever it is they choose to do.”
He hesitates. “Rhys—”
“No,” I say in a rush. I don’t know what it is between him and Rhys, but it doesn’t matter. “He’s beyond help now.”
Leo’s eyes shine with pain, but eventually, he nods and backs away. I watch him as he slips through the door, and I can’t help but hate myself a little bit for it because I know in that moment, I won’t tell them. I might feel something close to love—or at least some sort of fucked-up Stockholm version of it—but it isn’t enough for me not to hedge my bets.
Not yet.
I want to know how the hell Leo managed to get in and out without Phoenix detecting him, but I suppose I can let him keep that secret.
For now.
Ahead of us is a long road, and at the end of it, I suppose I will either end up the bride of Hades—Queen of the Underworld in whatever capacity he allows—or I take my chances with my brother. Nothing about what he said tonight is a lie, but it all might be just another manipulation.
I’m not sure Leo’s capable of playing a long game, but he’s not wrong about one thing: he’d be a better ruler than his brother.
I just don’t know, in a family like mine, what that would actually look like.
Lying back on the bed, I finally touch my stomach, rubbing my fingers over my skin. There’s absolutely no indication that I’m growing life apart from feeling like shit and a small test sitting back at home with the promise of what the future is going to be for this innocent life.
Off in the distance, I hear a quiet moan, followed by another deeper one. And then a third. I know the fourth is there—just silent as Ari is offered as much pleasure as I was before I passed out. I feel a quiet urge to join them, but with Leo’s cigar smell still lingering in the air and my almost betrayal of the promises I made Kane, I don’t let myself.
It’s not my right.
And I’m not sure I’ll ever deserve it again.
If only I had regrets.
