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)
The city below went about its Sunday. Cars moved. People walked. The world continued in its ordinary, relentless way, indifferent to the fact that in an office on the top floor of a glass-and-stone tower, a man was learning what it felt like to lose the only thing he had ever wanted.
He had promised her.
I am not that boy. I will never hurt you.
He had promised, and she had believed him. She had said yes with a voice that broke. She had let him hold her and touch her and learn the geography of her body and the music of her laugh. She had named his espresso machine and played his piano and put throw pillows on his couch and filled his fortress with sounds that made the silence retreat into the corners.
And all along, from the very first text she blocked and didn’t tell him about, she had been hiding something. Not an affair. Not a betrayal. A boy who wouldn’t let go, and a heart that was too kind to crush him.
But Alexei couldn’t see that. Not through the scent of deception. Not through the stammer and the blush. Not through the terror of a man who had found something he didn’t deserve and had been waiting, every day, for science to correct its mistake.
All he could see was that she had chosen to hide Billy’s name from him. And there was only one reason to hide a name.
Because it still mattered.
He would not keep her. He would not be the cage. He would not be the prince who trapped a woman in a marriage she didn’t want because his pride couldn’t survive the alternative. He would be the door.
Alexei stood. He straightened his jacket. He composed his face into the mask that had served him his entire life, the prince, the last of his kind, the man who needed nothing and no one.
And he drove home to let her go.
She was waiting in the living room.
Standing by the window where Billy had stood, though Alexei tried not to think about that, and when she heard him enter, she turned, and her face...
Her face was radiant.
The loveliest smile. Bright, warm, full of something that looked so much like happiness it made his chest crack along a fault line he hadn’t known existed.
She opened her mouth to speak.
“There’s been a mistake,” he said.
The smile faltered.
“A mistake?”
“I had our compatibility numbers rechecked.” His voice betrayed nothing. The voice of a man delivering a briefing, not a man whose world was collapsing one word at a time. “By Etienne Hirsche. I’m afraid our compatibility isn’t as ideal as Maryah’s system initially indicated.”
The color drained from her face.
“Oh. I...”
“Would you prefer a divorce or an annulment?”
The words hung in the air between them. Her lips parted. Her eyes, those wide, dark eyes that he had spent two weeks memorizing in every light, in every mood, in the golden haze of morning and the blue dark of 2 a.m., filled with something that looked like the world ending.
“I...I...”
She swallowed.
“May you excuse me for a moment?”
“Of course.”
She walked past him. Down the hallway. Her footsteps, quick, light, slightly uneven because she always walked faster on the left, receded into the silence of the fortress.
He listened until he couldn’t hear them anymore.
Then he stood in the empty living room and waited.
Five minutes. He stood by the window. The mountains were white against a winter sky and the light was flat and the room smelled like her, like warmth and coffee and the particular note that meant home, and the scent was everywhere and it was killing him.
Ten minutes. He moved to the center of the room. His hands at his sides. His composure intact, his face a mask, his body the picture of a man in control, and underneath the mask there was nothing but a boy standing in the ruins of a kingdom that no longer existed, watching everyone leave.
Fifteen minutes. The tightness in his chest became an edge. A blade pressing inward. She was not coming back. She was somewhere in the fortress, somewhere he couldn’t hear her, and the absence of her sounds was louder than anything he had ever heard.
Twenty minutes. He began to pace. Alexei Lykaios did not pace. He had not paced in his adult life. Pacing was the behavior of a man who could not contain himself, and he had built his entire existence on containment.
He was pacing.
Twenty-five minutes. The fortress was silent in a way it hadn’t been since before her. Not the old silence, the familiar companion. A new silence. A silence that had teeth.
Thirty minutes.
Against every instinct that told him not to, against the voice in his head that whispered let her go, you promised yourself you would let her go, he sat down at the console in his study and accessed the surveillance footage from earlier.