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Roman nodded.
“But… I never told her where you live,” Ruby said.
“A minor inconvenience apparently,” Roman said.
He didn’t sound mad — and he did tell Max to let Brooke up — but Ruby still worried about Brooke’s safety. The point of Ruby being here, of being cut off from her family, was to protect them from Roman’s world.
“Should I tell her to leave?” Ruby asked.
Ruby didn’t want anything to happen to her dad and her sister because of what she’d gotten mixed up in, but she also didn’t want Roman to feel the weight of more responsibility for the people in her life.
“Not unless you want to,” Roman said. “She obviously wants to make sure you’re being taken care of, and if she was spotted here, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Ruby couldn’t argue the logic. Excitement bubbled up inside her and she left the cups of tea steaming on the counter as she made her way down the hall toward the elevator.
She was about halfway down the hall when the elevator slid open. She barely had time to register her sister’s appearance — brown hair falling in waves around her face, pink cheeks highlighted by her red coat — before they were running into each other’s arms.
“Oh my god,” Brooke breathed into her hair. “I can’t believe I’m actually seeing you right now.”
“Same,” Ruby said, holding tight, fighting the sting of tears behind her eyelids.
It had been almost three months since she’d seen Brooke — three months since she’d been kidnapped by Igor’s men and held hostage in the grain terminal, rescued by Roman and forced to stay at his loft for her protection and the protection of her family.
They pulled back to look at each other. Brooke looked just the same, but Ruby could feel her sister’s eyes roam her face, searching for signs of damage.
Luckily for Ruby all her damage was internal: trauma from the kidnapping and her subsequent imprisonment, terror over the radio silence from Adam and what it meant for Olivia, moral conflict over her increasingly strong feelings for Roman and the ease with which she was slipping into his life.
“You look good,” Brooke finally said.
Ruby laughed. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
Brooke took in the hall leading to the rest of the loft, the glossy wood floors and expensive sconces, the imported rugs and Italian console table. “All this time I was worried sick and you’ve been kept in luxury.”
“I told you I was fine,” Ruby said. “You shouldn’t have come.”
Brooke’s gaze returned to her face. “This seems a lot more complicated than fine. I needed to see for myself, and Dad was worried too. It was either him or me. You can thank me later for accepting the challenge.”
Ruby almost shuddered thinking about her dad showing up at Roman’s loft. Her dad wasn’t a fighter — except when it came to his two daughters and his granddaughter. Roman would have destroyed him in a fight, but that wouldn’t have stopped her dad from trying to put Roman in his place.
“I’ll thank you now,” Ruby said.
“So are you going to invite me in or am I inviting myself?” Brooke asked.
Ruby laughed. She’d missed her sister’s tell-it-like-it-is brashness.
She took her sister’s hand and started down the hall. “Come in.”
“I’m honestly surprised I got this far,” Brooke said. “I thought that blond dude in the lobby was going to throw down when I said I was here to see you.”
“That’s Max,” Ruby said. “He called up to let Roman know you were here.”
“And Roman said it was okay?” Brooke asked.
Okaywas a stretch. “He said whatever damage was going to be done was already done so he told Max to let you up.”
“And does everyone always do what Roman says?” Brooke asked.
Yes. Ruby bit back the reply. Her sister wouldn’t understand, would think Roman was toxic, that Ruby followed his lead because she was under his control.
