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Then she nods. “Fine.” She takes her bag and disappears into the house.
I can feel myself rapidly losing control of this situation, but at least she agreed to stay. For the time being, she’s under my roof.
As long as she’s close, I can handle the rest.
37
TAYLOR
It’s been twenty-four hours since I left my room.
I’ve spent some of that time sleeping, some of it reading, but most of it staring at the antique weapons lining the opposite the bed. There’s a giant two-handed saber that I’m particularly taken with. It’s got a hundred years’ worth of nicks and grime on it, but the edge on the blade seems pretty sharp still. I don’t know much about weapons, but I could do some damage with it. How hard could it be? Aim the pointy end at the person you don’t like and swing it, right?
Celine would be horrified with me. She doesn’t even like movies with too much gore in them. I stepped on a butterfly by accident once when we were little and she cried for a week.
Which makes it all the more darkly comedic that she’s marrying a man like Ilarion. A man who hangs bloodstained battle axes on his walls and inspires otherwise innocent people like me to daydream about committing violence against that smug smirk of his.
When the door opens, I’m not at all surprised to see Mila in place of her brother. I’m guessing he’s in no rush to talk to me since our “negotiations” at the gates.
Fine by me.
I swing my legs down from where I had them propped on the back of the couch and glance at her with disinterest. “Tell me, Mila: do you ever resent having to follow your brother’s orders like a trained lackey?”
She shrugs. “I am a lackey. Just not a very well-trained one.” Then she falls onto the opposite end of the sofa, kicks off her shoes, and pulls her feet up. “You haven’t been eating.”
I roll my eyes. “Being kidnapped can really mess with your appetite.”
“You’re being protected, not imprisoned.”
“That’s a nice spin. You and your brother should really consider going into politics.”
“Just because you don’t agree with it doesn’t mean it’s not true. You’re carrying the heir to the Zakharov empire. That’s no small thing.”
The way she says it has goosebumps traveling along my arms. “Stop,” I say, holding up a hand. “My baby is no heir to anything, okay? This ismybaby.. And since Ilarion and Celine insist on marrying each other, whatever childrentheyhave together will be the heirs. Leave me and mine all the way out of it.”
I expect my tone to piss Mila off—hell, part of me was hoping for it—but instead, she leans back and regards me with curiosity. “What made you decide to keep the baby?”
I’m wary she’s pressing for information. “My decision had nothing to do with Ilarion.”
Mila lofts a brow. “I wasn’t implying it did.”
They keep saying I’m not a prisoner or a caged animal, but I sure feel like one or the other. I’m acting like it, too. My first conversation after a day in self-imposed solitary confinement and I’m ready to lash out at anyone who wanders too close.
“I’m twenty,” I finally say. “Having a baby never crossed my mind. It wasn’t even something I thought about wanting in the future. But then I saw those lines on the test, and I saw this little nugget in my belly when I went to the doctor’s, and…” I look up to find that Mila is watching me closely. “And…I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. But I just felt this strange, instinctive need to protect this little alien. I knew I couldn’t bear to get rid of it, and if I couldn’t do that…keeping it was the only option.”
She takes all that in with a solemn nod. “Do you think you’ll be a good mother?” It’s not a snotty question or a rude one. Just a curious one.
“I have no idea,” I admit. “But I do have a good example to follow. My mother was…” I choke up, but manage to hold down the sob. “She was the best.”
“Yeah, I got that at the funeral. Watching you cry over her grave…I felt the love you felt for her.”
When I glance at Mila, I start to realize that maybe her curiosity has to do with the fact that for perhaps the first time in her life, she’s seeing a different kind of family dynamic. From what little they’ve shared, it seems like the Zakharov siblings experienced a vastly different childhood with their own parents.
“Do you remember your mother at all?” I’m careful with how I ask because there’s no telling how she might react. Whenever the subject has come up before, however tangentially, she freezes and walls up.
Today, though, she just shrugs. “Some things,” she says. “Mostly that she had no interest in being a mother at all. She had Ilarion and I because she was required to provide heirs. We were just a part of the bargain she struck with our father.”
Her voice hitches strangely on “father,” but I don’t want to interrupt her.
