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I wish I could say he was lying.
But in reality, I’m not so sure. It justfeelsso much like a lie. I know my sister, and Celine can’t have been okay with the fact that Ilarion is who he is. I watched him kill people with my own eyes. There’s no denying the truth of it. The raw, cold, brutal, hideously ugly truth of it. Ofhim.
There’s always the chance that he’s sold her some weird, Disneyfied version of his life as a Bratva boss, but I can’t see Celine buying that. She’s naive, she’s kind, she was born wearing rose-colored glasses—but she isn’t stupid.
“Celine would have told me if that were true,” I rasp. I hate how unsure I sound.
He laughs cruelly. “She didn’t even tell you my full name. What makes you think she would have told you anything else?”
How does he know that, too? Whatdoesn’the know?
That’s when it finally sinks in. The only reason he could possibly know as much as he does is if Celine told him.
Which means she trusted him.
“You know what? We can have this conversation later, when Celine can join it,” I snap. “But for right now, I’d still like to see my mother.”
Ilarion doesn’t miss a beat. He looks past me and gestures for whoever is standing at the door to come in. I turn and see that Mila is there with a bunch of clothes draped over her arms. She’s probably been listening in for some time.
Great. Now, I’m humiliating myself in front of the whole damn family.
Mila silently hands me the pile of clothes. I force out a reluctant, “Thank you.”
“Try not to bleed on my clothes,” she says, utterly deadpan, before spinning on her heel and heading back out.
I slink into the bathroom and swap out the damp towel for the jeans and t-shirt. They’re snug, because Mila is a twig, but they work.
Enjoy this now. Everything will be too small in a few short months.
When I’m dressed, I step back out into the bedroom, where Ilarion is waiting for me. I try to avoid his gaze as I follow him out of the room and through the house, but that’s about as easy as avoiding an oncoming truck. He’s watching me like I’m going to run at any moment.
I’m not.
Well, not exactly.
“I, um…lost my phone in the chaos,” I tell him. “If you could call me a taxi—”
“There’s no need,” he interrupts as we step onto the driveway, where a shiny black car is waiting. “I will drive you.”
I don’t like that idea at all. “There’s no need for that.”
“Let me put it to you this way,” he corrects. “If I don’t take you, you’re not going.”
It’s a miracle how that imperious, slice-through-anything certainty in his voice that was such a turn-on the night we met can be so utterly, impossibly infuriating now.
“You’re serious?”
“Take a wild guess.”
The instinct to push back is there, but I’m too desperate to waste any more time. My mom needs me more than I need to scrap and claw for my dignity.
“Fine,” I snap. “You wanna play the chauffeur? Go right ahead.”
I get into the passenger’s seat and slam the door. He doesn’t say anything as he walks around the front of the car, gets into the driver’s seat, and turns the engine on.
I hate that he always seems to come out ahead of me. No matter how hard I try, it feels like I’m always lagging behind. And as much as I hate to admit it, it feels like a part of that is Celine’s doing.
She wouldn’t have done it intentionally, of course. She was sharing parts of her life with a man she trusted. My problem is with how fast she chose to trust him.
