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In Russian.
“What is that?”
I swallow as my eyes lift to Eilish’s. “It’s a short-range surveillance bug.”
“What?”
I hand it to her. Eilish twists it in her hands, her brows furrowing as she peers at it. “The writing on this is Russian.”
I nod.
“Okay, but if Elsa was working for the Russians—”
“Then why the fuck were they bugging her goddamn gym bag,” I finish.
Elsa took this bageverywhere. My house. Her apartment. In locker rooms, and bathrooms. All places she’d never knowingly bring a hot microphone.
And suddenly, it starts to click.
Her drive. The way she’s been married to her job her whole life. The carefully hammered armor around her emotions and her heart. The way it’s always seemed, since the first day I met her, that Elsa was the type of person who was constantly moving forward, because therewasno way backward.
But I’m suddenly realizing it wasn’t because she was hungry for tomorrow.
…It’s because she was beingchased.
Holy fuck.
Maybe she is Leo’s kid. But I’ve been blinded so completely by my rage that I’ve overlooked the obvious.
She raised Nora alone.
She goes by Guin, her mother’s maiden name, not Stavrin.
She came to New York for a new job—a newlife. And then Leo dropped in less than a month later.
She was so cagey about her motives that night at Club Venom—why she went there that night to, come hell or high water, lose her virginity.
Oh shit.
“And he’s angry about a girl. There was a marriage proposal recently concerning the daughter of a would-be ally that is no longer favorable to a traditional man like my son.”
Holy shit.
The would-be-ally was fuckingLeo. And Elsa was the goddamn marriage trophy. Her fucking me and losing her virginity that night was to torpedo that arrangement.
She didn’t go to Leo’s place that night afterward to reveal information to him, or to report back on spying on me.
She went there totell him what she did. And I don’t think it was because she felt like sharing intimate details of her goddamned sex life with her father.
It was a fuck you. A middle finger.
It was finally severing a tie between them.
When it all hits at once, I literally choke from the weight of it slamming down on me.
Holy fuck.
“Hades?”
