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I glare between them both. “So you wanted to get rid of me?”
Kirill lifts his hand in a stop sign. “No, we did not. It was not about you. It was about your mom marrying Nataniele.”
“And I just got caught up in the crossfire,” I say bitterly.
Tino takes my hand, and the feel of his skin on mine is enough to stop my heart. I can’t bear it. It hurts too much, and I snatch it away.
“We’re sorry, Kenzie. We can’t even say how sorry. We just want to make things better.”
“You can’t fix me. It doesn’t work that way. I have to live with my condition.”
Kirill presses his lips into a line. “What can we do to help?”
“Nothing. Stay the hell away from me. That’s what you can do to help.”
Tino shakes his head. “We can’t do that. You are ours now. We’re no more capable of leaving you alone than cutting off a limb.”
The crazy thing is, I believe him. It’s as though I’ve become an obsession to them, and not in a good way. They love me—they hate me. They want me to leave, but they can’t bear to lose me.
A person could be torn in two under such opposing forces.
“Dom still wants me gone, doesn’t he? He’s not going to appreciate it if you suddenly go all caring on me.”
Kirill straightens his spine. “Dom is not the boss of us.”
I arch my brow. “Could have fooled me.”
Tino edges farther onto the bed, one leg swinging. “Anyway, he regrets how things went down. Seeing you collapse like that. It made him realize some stuff. It made all of us realize some stuff.”
“Like what? Like you’re supposed to care about me? Fuck off, both of you. You’ve ruined my life. If you think I’m going to come crawling back to you just because you feel guilty that you were messing with a sick girl, you can think again. I never want to see any of you, or Verona Falls, again.”
Tino softens his tone. “Where are you going to go, Duchess?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. And don’t call me that.”
Kirill bites his lower lip and tilts his head as he regards me. “We are not going to just let you leave.”
I scoff laughter. “So, first you want to get rid of me, and then you’re going to force me to stay? Do you have any idea what you sound like?”
“Like Dom,” he admits.
I know I shouldn’t be worried about Dom. He deserves whatever is coming to him. But Nataniele is a dangerous man. A powerful man. Does he have it in him to hurt his own son? I want to tell myself that he doesn’t, but the world I’d lived in before now, where I thought I could depend on people’s morals, no longer exists. My stomach twists. I want to tell myself that I’d take pleasure in him being punished, but I can’t bring myself to believe that.
Would a father really hurt his son?
Would a wife have her husband murdered?
Would a young woman kill her lover?
I know at least two of these things to be true, so why not the third?
Chapter 3
Mackenzie
I sink as low as possible in the car seat, my fingers lightly resting against my temple so my palm hides my face. I use my dark blonde hair as a curtain, creating an extra layer of protection against the world.
The doctors kept me in the hospital for two days before allowing me to be discharged. I’m still incredibly drained from going through such a bad episode, but I’m feeling a little better and the brain fog has lifted. Despite all my big words to Tino and Kirill about not coming back to Verona Falls, the truth is, I don’t have anywhere else to go. I feel like a prisoner to all the people who want to hurt me.
