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“Marika—we don’t know that he’s telling the truth—”
“I do.” She swallows hard, tears dripping down her cheeks anew, and it’s my turn to stare at her in horror, because she could have so easily turned her brother against me. Whether or not sheactuallybelieves me, this was the moment for her revenge, the moment when she could have found some way to convince Nikolai—probably without that much difficulty—that she had reason to believe I’m lying, and that I did what his father set me up to do. After the scene in the office, after what Nikolai heard, I can’t imagine it would have been that hard.
But after all the lies, she’s choosing now to tell the truth.
“I don’t believe he would have had an affair with a married woman,” she says softly. “Not with what I know of him now. And even if some married woman could have tempted him, it wouldn’t have been our mother. Not the wife of another powerful man, the second most powerful man in the city. The affair would have threatened too much, if it was found out.” She takes a deep, slow breath, without looking at me. “I believe the one thing that matters most to Theo is what his family has built. His family’s legacy. He wouldn’t have risked that for lust.”
And with those words, my heart shatters in a way that I never knew it could.
No one has ever said, out loud, something that strikes to the deepest part of me so clearly. I realize at that moment that Marika knows me. That in our brief marriage so far, she paid enough attention to me, to the things I said, to the thingsunsaid, to know me so well.
I wasn’t wrong to think that she could have been the wife I never knew I could want.
If only she hadn’t lied. If only I’d known the truth.
If only her brother hadn’t set this all up in the first place.
If only—but then I never would have had her at all.
This was always going to go up in flames.
“Marika—” I reach out for her, but she jerks away from me, trembling.
“I won’t be a part of this any longer,” she whispers, looking at her brother and then finally at me.
“Marika, I—” I can hear the same words that were on Nikolai’s lips falling off of mine, thatMarika, I— that I know she’ll cut off, but I can feel the apology burning at the back of my throat, even as I don’t know what to say. How can I begin to apologize for what’s happened here? How could I possibly fix what’s happened with a simpleI’m sorry? It won’t be enough, and I know that. Not when she knows as well as I do that a part of me was terribly, painfully aroused by what happened upstairs. That it turned me on as much as it horrified me.
It aroused her, too, but that won’t matter right now.
But I have to say something.
“I’m sorry, Marika—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” She rounds on me, her voice high and shrill, like I’ve never heard it before. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.‘I’m sorry?’That’s what you have for me? After you humiliated me in front of your men, in front of Adrik, after what you made me do—” A shudder runs through her. “You can go fuck yourself.”
I can see in the way her face has gone bone-white, in the taut look there, in the crazed expression in her eyes, that she’s beyond caring what happens to her for what she says. She’s beyond worrying about her punishment or about consequences. She’s finished with this, and that digs the broken pieces of my heart in deeper, makes me feel it bleeding in ways I never knew I could.
I thought I knew what I had to lose with Marika, but I only knew the beginning of it. My feelings for her were deeper than even I realized—and it’s too late now.
“Marika—” Nikolai’s voice rumbles through the room, and Marika wheels, turning on him with those same blazing, furious eyes.
“You can go fuck yourself, too! Both of you can. Ineverwanted to be a pawn in all of this,” she hisses. “If I made a mistake in letting Adrik be my first, I’ll accept that, but it wasmychoice. I waskidnappedbecause of our family! I was starved and beaten, lived days in that compound wondering when Ivan might let his guards violate me, wondering what was in store for me. I wantedsomethingfor myself. I hoped I might be able to convince you to let me do things differently, to—”
“To marry Adrik?” Nikolai looks stunned. “You can’t possibly think—”
“I don’t know!” Marika throws her hands up, looking both frustrated and furious all at once. “I don’t fucking know! I wanted him, and I cared for him. That’sallI know. I wanted time to figure it out. I wanted a chance to make my own choice, even if that meant someone other than Adrik. I thought after what happened to me on account of our family, you might at least give me that—the chance to have a normal relationship, to figure it out on my own terms, to decide if it was going somewhere or if I wanted to end it. But then youneededme to marry Theo. To stop a war, you said, to save our family, and how thefuckcould I say no? I couldn’t tell either of you what I’d done then.Youwouldn’t have taken me if I wasn’t a virgin,” she added, wheeling back to glare at me. “You would have just murdered my fucking family over a few drops of blood on a sheet and one man in my bed!”
“I don’t know,” I admit quietly, and I feel the weight of that sentence hang over the room. I’ve never thought about it that way before. I’ve lived my whole life under the traditions that all men in this world are raised with, with the idea that our brides must be virgins, even if we’ve fucked hundreds of women, that innocence is prized above all, that nothing else matters besides purity and pedigree, when it comes to taking a bride. And yet—
Once I had met Marika, would I have turned her away for having made one choice? If she would be mine forever, would it have mattered so much that there had been another man?
“If you had told me after the dinner—if you had assured me that it was over between the two of you, I might have let it go,” I tell her quietly. “It’s the lie that makes it difficult for me to forgive you, Marika, not the man.”
“And if I had said I wasn’t sure? If I had said it would take me time to get over him, but that I would try? If I had told youeverything?” She narrows her eyes at me. “You can’t tell me for sure. You can’t say, without lying tome, that you wouldn’t have forfeited the marriage and taken down my family instead. So you see why I had to lie. And for what it’s worth,” she snaps, her voice taking on a colder, harsher edge, “Ididn’tlie to you in Ireland. I didn’t ask Adrik to come. I told himnotto. He did all that of his own volition. I pulled away, when he came up to our room and tried to get me in bed. I slapped him, when he kissed me in the alley—but your man didn’t seethat,” she adds contemptuously. “I told him to leave me alone, until this marriage came to an end.”
“Until I was dead,” I reply icily, but what she’s saying strikes me to my core. She’s right that she was left with little choice of whether or not to be honest. The web of manipulation and lies that Nikolai drew her into left her with little recourse—and my own threats agains the Vasilev family…though I would never have imagined that the prospective bride I was offered would come to me,nota virgin.
“I didn’t want you dead,” she says softly, her voice laced with fresh pain. “I was starting to have feelings for you. Starting to fall for you, even—to imagine the life you were painting for us. I saw that you were a different man than what I’d been told. I saw that there was more to you than Nikolai knew—but I didn’t know what to do about it. And I didn’t have time to figure it out. I didn’t knowhowto be honest with you—how to explain—”
