“No…” Nikolett glanced from her to the odd cast and back.
Elena finished buckling the 3D-printed cast that looked like the mesh bags onions came in, then clapped her hands. “The Bachelorette—Masters’ Admiralty edition!”
“Have you thought about our conversation regarding love?” Dr. Mata’s voice was slightly elevated to be heard over the wind whipping up the cliff.
Eric nodded. “Yes.”
“Anything you want to share?”
“I did love her. Love Dahlia. But it wasn’t the same way I loved Trina.”
“There are types of love—familial, romantic, platonic—and even with one type, say romantic love, there is a spectrum.” Dr. Mata held his hands out, indicating a range, then spread the fingers of his right hand. “Over here, we have that seemingly all-consuming love often referred to as new love. Or actively being in love.”
Eric bent his knee, resting his elbow on it. All-consuming love. Being in love. He knew that end of the spectrum, because he was living in that hell.
He was in love with Nikolett, and that meant not just worrying about her safety every second of every day but simply…missing her.
He wanted to see her. Talk to her. Wanted to hear her tell him about her day, or explain how and why he was fucking something up. He found her scolding him unexpectedly arousing, given he would have sworn before now that wasn’t one of his many kinks.
Dr. Mata wiggled his left hand. “Here we have a more mellow love. Still romantic love, but not as obvious as on the right.” He dropped his hands. “One end or the other isn’t more valid.”
They’d discussed this in depth during that first conversation which had unexpectedly turned into a multi-hour therapysession. At first, Eric had balked, not wanting to let go of his guilt over “not loving” Dahlia. He stayed up half the night, thinking back on his marriage in a way he hadn’t in years. The sky had been light with dawn before he finally went to sleep, his body feeling bruised from the reflection and remembering.
At least he hadn’t had a nightmare.
That bruised feeling had yet to go away, probably because he hadn’t let Regina lock Dr. Mata in the dungeon.
“I loved Dahlia, but wasn’t in love with her.” Eric leaned back on his hands, the sparse grass and rocky soil damp under his palms. “Maybe it was because we—Trina and I—didn’t live with her. Maybe it was because I always felt like a bit of a brute when it came to sex because she was nervous no matter how gentle I tried to be. Not that we had sex that often.”
“Obviously I can’t diagnose her, but it sounds as if your wife Dahlia was experiencing agoraphobia and mysophobia.”
Mysophobia—the technical name for germaphobia. He’d just learned that yesterday.
Eric nodded, eyes closed and face tipped up to the sun. They’d talked extensively about his first marriage over the past two days. Eric had told Dr. Mata things he’d never said out loud before.
He hadn’t even realized how deep his guilt about his feelings toward Dahlia ran, and how attached he was to that guilt, until they talked about it.
Dr. Mata was sitting on the ground beside him, and Eric appreciated that the other man hadn’t balked about walking along the cliffs or sitting on the sea-spray damp ground. Now, Dr. Mata leaned forward and twisted to make eye contact for his next words. “Tell me how Dahlia died.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Welcome to The Great One, Masters’ Admiralty style!” Elena whisked a sparkly gold cloth off the rolling whiteboard with a flourish.
Nikolett resisted the urge to lay her head down on the table and either laugh or cry.
“Can we call her The Great One from now on?” Iacob idly flipped a knife as he lounged in the high-backed conference chair.
“No,” Nikolett said at the same time Nyx replied, “Yes.”
They were clustered in the ground-floor conference room in territory headquarters—otherwise known as Nikolett’s house. The small conference table had eight chairs, but the one at the other end of the table had been pulled to the side to make room for Elena’s rolling white board.
Nikolett sat at the head of the table, with Nyx and Grigoris on her right. There were three harcosok present—Maxim, who sat on her left, with Iacob beside him, and Elena herself, who was technically a knight, though she functioned as a privatephysician rather than the law and order for the territory as harcosok were meant to.
Oksana Melnyk, one of Hungary’s new finance ministers, had the last seat on the left. She was leaning back in her chair studying Elena’s board. Oksana was here not only because, as a finance minister, she was part of the territory’s leadership but because she was a brilliant strategist. Based in Kyiv, she specialized in post-conflict economic development and recovery strategies.
On the other side of Grigoris, the last seat on the right, had Zoran Baka, one of her newer security officers. Zoran was famous in tech circles for his development of a mobile payment system that was used by citizens of Northern Macedonia in lieu of the Denar when their currency was destabilized. That in turn kept the economy from collapsing.
He was also quietly infamous for his development of software to navigate non-indexed digital information—state-of-the-art software that could access the dark web. It made him unparalleled at running background searches, provided they gave him good starting information.
