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“Not at all,” Tina said, her voice far from weak. “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been wondering when you’d come to visit me.”
“I wanted to come sooner, but something came up,” Sienna said apologetically, then explained, “One of your attackers has been caught and Aiden tried to interrogate him.”
“You didn’t get much from him, did you?” Tina asked, reaching her own conclusions just by looking at Sienna’s expression.
“He took a suicide pill before we could make him talk,” Sienna explained and shook her head to banish the image of his dying form.
“I figured as much,” Tina commented and sat straighter. “Come, sit down.”
Sienna joined her on the bed, and only now from up close, she could see a little bruise on the side of her face.
“I hit it against the car and landed awkwardly on the floor,” Tina explained when she noticed her staring. “The right side of my hip is completely black. It hurts like hell.”
“I’m sorry,” Sienna said, not knowing what else to say.
“It is what it is,” Tina replied with a nonchalant shrug. “I suppose I’ve been through worse. Lyle wasn’t as bad as Kyle is, but he wasn’t anywhere close to an angel.”
“How did you end up marrying him?” Sienna asked, realizing that she had no idea what happened to Tina after she left the university.
“Believe it or not, we met at rehab,” Tina told her, staring her story with a nostalgic smile. “For privacy reasons, we weren’t allowed to use our last names. I had no idea who he was, and he didn’t know anything about me, except what I shared in group therapy.”
“You loved him,” Sienna concluded, and Tina nodded.
“He was funny and charming when he was sober,” Tina told her, then shuddered when a particularly bad memory forced itself forward. “We got married two weeks after leaving rehab, and he fell off the wagon during our honeymoon, but it was after we returned from Europe that he became violent. A part of me insists on believing that it was his father’s and his brother’s fault. I keep on trying to convince myself that he really loved me, and it wasn’t all a sham.”
“Addiction is a disease,” Sienna said in an attempt to console her, repeating what she heard many times before. “He wasn’t in control of his actions when he was under the influence of drugs.”
“I suppose,” Tina allowed, then took a tissue and blew her nose. Sienna politely looked away until she was done.
“How did the attack happen?” Sienna finally asked her what she really wanted to know.
“It was so fast,” Tina said quietly, her eyes glazing over as she got lost in the memory, describing the situation to Sienna. “I spent the day dealing with the papers, changing my last name from Remington to Ryder.”
A ghost of a smile appeared on Sienna’s lips, her chest warming up at the thought that she wasn’t the only Ryder anymore.
“I had to go to the bank to open a new account and transfer the funds that you gave me,” Tina continued. “The attack happened on our way out. I don’t have it quite clear how it went because it was so fast, but this is what I remember. I went through the front door and was going down the stairs when one of my bodyguards from behind pushed me forward. I went flying, hitting my head against the car and landing badly, hurting my hip on the edge of the stair.”
Sienna failed to cover a wince. A mind is a marvelous thing, capable of conjuring up the picture exactly in a way Tina was describing it, accompanying it with the unnecessary emotions of pain. Her attention on her narrative, Tina either didn’t notice or care about Sienna’s reaction.
“There were at least four guys aiming their guns at us,” Tina continued, surprising Sienna with the information that there wasn’t only one attacker. “I must’ve lost my consciousness from the pain, because I don’t remember what happened next, but from what I’ve managed to gather, my bodyguards killed three of the attackers, and judging by what you told me, captured one.”
“I don’t know all the details, but that sounds about right,” Sienna agreed. “We were told that there were no casualties and that you were unharmed.”
Tina let out a dry chuckle. “Unharmed isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe myself, but yeah, at least I’m not dead.”
“I’m really sorry, Tina,” Sienna said, her voice breaking.
“It’s not your fault,” Tina assured her and gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “I don’t blame you for any of this. We’ve all made our bed, and now we have to lie in it.”
“Reap what you sew,” Sienna muttered and rolled her eyes.
“Sadly, that’s the way it goes.”
“There must be something that I can do,” Sienna insisted as she stood up and paced the room, the wheels in her mind turning as she was thinking out loud. “Kyle sent his men to assassinate you because he thought you were me. We froze his assets, making it impossible to access the Remington money. Thanks to the marriage license, he believes that when I die, he’ll inherit everything that belongs to me, which in his mind is a vast fortune.”
Sienna kept pacing, trying to come up with a solution that would lower the bounty on her and make her less valuable. Her head jerked up, and she locked her eyes with Tina’s.
“He doesn’t know that I’ve shared half of the Aghayan fortune with you, nor does he know that I’ve given up all rights to the Lockwood inheritance, leaving Angel as the sole heir,” Sienna said, taking Tina’s surprised expression as a confirmation that her actions weren’t public knowledge.
