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I give Winter my bag with all my belongings and tell her to spray my perfume. She does that with glee and waves two fingers at me.
Hiding in the bathroom, I keep the door open the slightest bit to watch her go to Yan and Boris. My heart hammers loudly, expecting them to find out and come in for me, but they just walk in front of her, talking animatedly in Russian.
I release a breath, but the relief is short-lived. How could they not realize it’s not me? I know we look alike, but still. I’m disappointed in Boris and Yan—especially the latter.
Adrian will see her as me, too. He’ll touch her like he touches me, fuck her the way he fucks me.
Nausea assaults me and I want to throw up my guts in the toilet. However, I force myself to straighten and hold my head high.
This is for my survival.
I might love Adrian, but I won’t stick around until he’s bored of me, until he makes me go really crazy.
Now, to the next part of my plan.
Rai said she’d help me, and I believe her because she’s strong enough in the brotherhood to go behind Adrian’s back. Unlike Luca, she wants nothing in return.
I’ll tell her to hide me from Adrian, then help me escape from him once and for all.
38
Adrian
Being someone who trusts his system to the point of blindness, I can tell when something is wrong.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out where everything hit rock bottom. When the fuck did I start to lose the top-notch efficiency my system provided?
One thing’s for certain, Lia has something to do with it. Or, more accurately, my obsession with her does.
At one point, it became carnal and dark. I tried to lighten it at the beginning, to make up for my lack of feelings with my actions, to show her that she’s special to me, even if I’m wired differently and didn’t know how to feel as she secretly wished.
I thought she’d eventually see the effort I was making. It’d take time, but it would happen. Lia would come to me, not work against me. She’d trust me and talk to me.
But she chose another man.
One who has been in hiding since she confessed her adultery, because there’s no way in fuck she would’ve met him since then. I’ve been assigning an army to stay on her case and installing cameras everywhere she goes.
The more I smother her into my closed off system, the closer I am to losing control, because I know, I just know, this is heading for the worst, not the better.
I had a talk with her shrink—or more like threatened her shrink—and she said that her hallucinations are getting worse. She’s escalating from when she started to have this condition as a kid. In the past, antidepressants and sleeping pills managed to gradually rid her of her neurotic episodes, but lately, she’s been talking to Ogla about things that never happened.
She told me that Lia recently crossed paths with Hannah, her previous colleague and the current New York City Ballet’s prima ballerina. However, that never happened.
The psychotherapist is worried because this could be the beginning of a dissociation episode. Her condition has gotten worse since she was shot at during the women’s gathering organized by Rai. She had a PTSD episode and said she saw red eyes coming for her.
When the doctor said that she shouldn’t be put in stressful situations or surrounded by people who make her anxious, I distanced myself further. Even though it kills me to stay away from her, I can at least recognize that I’m the major cause of her depression and anxiety. Even Ogla, whom she didn’t get along with at the beginning, has gotten closer to her.
The only person in this house whom she loses her smile upon seeing is me.
Even my fucking guards get her smiles. But never me.
There’s a permanent frown etched upon her features when she meets my gaze. Her delicate face pulls down with deep, tangible sadness.
Fuck that.
I still believe that I’ll be able to draw out the Lia from the past. The Lia who sat down with me for dinners and talked about everything and nothing, trying every trick under the sun to get me to talk as well.
But first, I need to find the fucker she cheated on me with, figure out his relation to her and Lazlo. Only after I kill him in a slow death will I be able to breathe again.
