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But the line went dead.
She took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly, Olivia’s voice ringing through her heart like an echo.
Roman was still sitting next to her, but she was glad he didn’t say anything while she collected her thoughts. Hearing Olivia’s voice again was a balm to the open wound of her absence, but it was also a reminder.
Olivia wasn’t safe with Adam. Ruby felt it in her bones.
She was too familiar with carefully worded responses to potentially revealing questions, too practiced in the tap dance of trying to sound normal while hiding the truth.
She looked at Roman. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “How is she?”
“She’s…” Ruby shook her head. “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.”
She waited for Roman to tell her Olivia would be fine, that she was safe, that it was natural for Ruby to feel uncomfortable separated from her daughter.
Instead he just looked at her and said, “We’re going to get her back.”
Ruby didn’t question his choice of pronoun. She’d passed the point where she thought she might fix this herself. The web was too tangled, the stakes too high.
Whether she liked it or not, she needed Roman Kalashnik.
She tried not to think about the fact that she didn’t hate it as much as she should.
She nodded, willing herself to believe it was true.
Roman stood. “You know what?”
She looked up at him, tried not to notice how beautiful he was, how much she still wanted him. “What?”
“We need to get out of here,” he said.
“Out like… out out? Like ‘not on the roof deck out?’”
He smiled. “Out out.”
“I thought it was too dangerous,” she said.
“Leave that part to me,” Roman said. “Can you be dressed for dinner in an hour?”
“Dressed for dinner?” She could hardly comprehend the words after being trapped in the loft for so long. “I don’t think I have anything to wear that falls under the headingdressed for dinner.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s my fault. Make it two hours. I’ll have something sent over.”
She smiled in spite of the weird situation. This man and his life were crazy.
“Is that a yes?” Roman asked.
Say no. Say no. Say no.
She couldn’t go out to dinner with Roman. It was too much like a date.
“It’s a yes.”
25
Roman
