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“Then they’d be wrong,” I say darkly. “You make sure every Zakharov man knows that Archie Theron is off-limits. No one touches him. Not until I give an explicit command.”
“That won’t go over well,” she argues. “And things are fragile enough as it is after the rumor that Benedict started circulating.”
“Are we calling it a rumor, then? It’s just you and me here, Mila.”
Her eyes darken. “Iwas the one he hurt, Ilarion,” she whispers. “Not you. I was the one Father tried to break. I was the one who deserved to pull the trigger.”
“I know,” I agree. “Which is why I let you do it. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the men to swallow.”
“Then we do what we’ve been doing for the past few years: deny it.”
I snort. “Not you, too?” At her curious stare, I shake my head. “This whole fucking house is full of denial.”
She grits her teeth. “Sometimes, I think it would be a fuck-ton easier if I just came out and said it. Admitted it to everyone once and for all. I did it. I killed our father and I don’t regret it.”
“No one likes an honest woman, Mila. They’ll crucify you for it.”
She waves a dismissive hand. “I’m not afraid of death. It’s not as though I’ve done a very good job with my life.”
I’m tense now, given the topic we’re skirting around. But she has to know that I would never just forfeit her like that. No matter what, she is my sister. And I will protect her until my last breath—even against herself.
“You can change that.”
“No,” she says firmly. “I’ve tried. It’s not gonna happen.”
“Talk to Dima.”
She abruptly jumps to her feet and walks to the door. “I’m going to speak to our tracking team, see if there are any new leads that we can follow.”
“Mila—”
“And then I’ll go check on Taylor. She looked a little pale when I last saw her.”
“Mila—”
“If there’s something to report, I’ll let you know.”
She slams the door on me. I lie back against the sofa, staring at the textured ceiling, hoping that the answers to my problems are etched somewhere in the plaster.
But I’ve been doing this for too long to believe that things will just magically sort themselves out. There’s no such thing as fate; there’s no such thing as luck. Luck and fate are what I make of them.
And if I can’t make them better…
I’m going to make everything else worse.
31
TAYLOR
I’m back to square one.
Five years since I left and nothing at all is different. I knew that if I stayed, I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretense for long. My feelings for Ilarion would cloud my judgment, and eventually, we would end up doing something stupid. We’d end up hurting Celine. We’d end up blowing up our lives.
And yet I still tried fooling myself into believing otherwise.This will be different,I told myself when he reappeared in our lives.This will work.
Yeah fucking right.
After what had just happened in the corridor, I can’t keep lying to myself anymore.
