Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
“A Mr. Stein, ma’am. Billy Stein.”
The coffee mug in my hands goes very still.
The library goes very still.
Everything goes very still, and the world narrows to the two words in the staff member’s mouth and the blood leaving my face and the particular, sickening lurch of my stomach that accompanies two realities crashing together that were never, ever supposed to touch.
Billy is here.
Billy is here, at the fortress, at my husband’s home, on a Sunday morning when my husband just left for the first time since we were married, and the coincidence of that timing is a thought I can’t complete because completing it would mean acknowledging something I’m not ready to acknowledge.
How did he even get here? The fortress exists in a pocket dimension. The roads only appear when they’re supposed to. You can’t just Google Maps your way to the Prince of Atlantis’s front door.
Unless you’ve been watching long enough to learn the way.
I shut that thought down. Hard.
“Ma’am?” the staff member says. “Shall I...”
“Yes.” My voice sounds far away. “Yes, let him in.”
I don’t know why I say it. I should say no. I should tell the staff member to send him away, to close the gate, to inform Mr. Stein that Mrs. Lykaios is not receiving visitors. That would be the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing that a woman who has spent two weeks building a new life would do to protect it.
But I’m not a woman who leaves things unfinished.
He’s standing in the living room when I walk in.
And the first thing I think, the very first thing, before the shock settles, before the anger arrives, before any of the complicated emotions that come with seeing someone who broke your heart, is: he’s smaller than I remember.
Not physically. Billy is tall, fit, his long blond hair pulled back in that ponytail he always wore, the emo poet look I used to find romantic. But standing in Alexei’s living room, in the fortress that my husband built, surrounded by the quiet power of a space that belongs to the Prince of Atlantis, Billy Stein looks diminished. Like a candle brought into a room that’s already full of sunlight.
He turns when he hears me. And his face...
He looks the same and completely different. The same dark eyes, eyes I used to think were soulful, before I understood they were just confused, the eyes of a boy who never quite figured out how to step out of his mother’s shadow. The same jaw, the same face I used to trace with my fingers in the dark while he whispered promises he didn’t keep. But there are shadows under his eyes now, and something in the set of his mouth that I’ve never seen before, a rawness, an openness, like the boy who hid everything has finally run out of places to hide.
“Zia.” His voice cracks on my name. He takes a step forward, and his hand comes up, instinctive, automatic, reaching for my cheek the way he used to, leaning in to press his lips to my face.
I step back.
Quick. Sharp. My body moving before my brain has finished processing, because whatever we were, whatever we had, that intimacy belongs to another woman. A woman who doesn’t exist anymore. A woman who waited for his texts and wore his secret like armor and believed that a hidden love was still love.
Billy’s hand drops. His face crumbles for a second before he catches it.
“W-why are you here?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “What exactly do you want?”
“Zia, I just need to talk to you. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why are you so nervous?” He frowns. Studies me. And something shifts in his expression, a hardening, a flash of the old Billy, the one who made assumptions and followed them to conclusions that suited him. “Did he forbid you to talk to me? He did, didn’t he? That’s why I waited for him to leave...”
My eyes widen.
He breaks off.
But it’s too late.
The words are already in the room, filling the space between us with their full, horrifying weight. I waited for him to leave. Not I happened to come by. Not I took a chance that you’d be home. He waited. He watched. He knew when Alexei left and how long he’d been gone and he chose this specific window of time to show up at a fortress that doesn’t appear on any map.
“Have you been stalking me?”
CHAPTER TEN
THE SCREEN IN HIS OFFICE was dark, and Alexei was staring at it the way a man stares at a door he knows he shouldn’t open.
The city below was quiet. Sunday-morning quiet. Silence that should feel peaceful but didn’t, because silence had a different texture now. Before Zia, silence was familiar. An old companion. Something he’d made his peace with long ago in a fortress that echoed with nothing.