AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“A woman knows when a man is thinking of another woman,” she says vaguely. “I’ve confronted him about it, and he hasn’t exactly denied it. But the thing is, I’ve never actually found evidence of another woman. And trust me—I tried.”
I raise my brows. “Oh?”
Celine nods. “I’ll deny it if you ever repeat this, but I had him followed our first year of marriage. He goes to clubs, bars, places where temptation runs rampant, and all he does is exactly what he tells me he’d do. Attend meetings, schmooze clients, make business deals, drink a little, and that’s about it. Of course, that doesn’t mean much in the end. Just because I haven’t caught him in bed with another woman doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
I frown. “So…how is he with you?”
“He’s good to me,” she says without hesitation. “He can be standoffish at times, but more often than not, he’s kind, thoughtful and attentive.”
See what I mean?Something’s not adding up.
“If he treats you well, and if you’ve found no evidence of an affair, then what makes you think there is one?” I ask. “Maybe he’s loyal to you and you’re refusing to believe that.”
She shakes her head, certainty etched all over her face. “He’s not loyal to me, Taylor,” she insists softly. “He’s loyal toher.”
Her.
The word leaves a bitter taste on my tongue, and I’m not the one who’s spoken. “I don’t understand. What makes you say that?”
Her eyes cloud over and she turns away from me. She breathes in the air and exhales quietly. “I’ve always loved this place,” she murmurs. “It’s so peaceful.”
She’s avoiding the question, and I don’t have the heart to push her to answer it. It’s not like I have the right to push her.
“Ilarion mentioned that you moved out at one point,” I say, shifting gears. “That you moved back into your old apartment?”
The only sign of her curiosity is a slight arch of one brow. “What else did he tell you?”
“Just that. He didn’t say why.” I decide to save my own skin with some truth. “We were arguing and he just…threw it at me.”
“I suppose that was our version of a break-up,” she admits. “I ended things with him. Well, I say that, but it’s not like he was exactly fighting for me to stay.”
“Was it because you suspected that he had someone else?”
“More or less,” she says. “He was offering me less of a life and more of an ‘arrangement.’ I decided that I didn’t want that, so I moved out, back to my old apartment. I was lucky that Vanessa hadn’t sublet my room.”
“Vanessa,” I repeat, remembering Celine’s old roommate as though she belonged to another lifetime. I suppose, in a way, she did. “How is she?”
“Dead.”
I nearly choke on my own spit. “Excuse me? Vanessa died?” I repeat. “How?”
“It was meant to be me.”
“I’m not following.”
But I am. I just don’t want to.
“Benedict Bellasio had eyes on me,” she explains. “The moment he realized that I wasn’t under Ilarion’s protection anymore, he made a move. My new life wasn’t even a week old when the apartment went up in flames. His timing was off, though. Ilarion suspects that he mistook Vanessa for me. I came home from a jog to find two firetrucks and a news team outside the building. Everything else was rubble and ash.”
As calm as she is while telling me this story, there are goosebumps all over her exposed skin. Hell, there are goosebumps onmyskin and I wasn’t even there.
“So Vanessa…”
“The forensics team claimed the bathroom door was jammed and that was why she couldn’t get out in time. She had inhaled so much smoke that by the time they pulled her out, there was very little they could do. Asphyxiation through smoke inhalation. That was what they wrote as the cause of death.” Celine’s eyes shimmer, but there’s no trace of a tear in them. “That was how I ended up back at Zakharov House. It was the first assassination attempt and the first inclination I had that Ilarion actually cared about me. I guess that’s why I convinced myself that staying with him might not be such a bad thing after all. I mean, if he cared enough about me to want me alive, then there had to be some feelings there. Like I said: it was naïve.”
I’m silent. What the hell do you say to something like that? I want to give her something, anything, but the words just won’t come.
She sighs. “I still have dreams about Vanessa. It should have been me.”
