!I don’t understand this,” I murmur.
“I don’t either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right,” he says.
“I didn’t plan to feel like this,” I add quietly. “That’s the part that scares me.”
“I think that’s to be expected,” he says, moving into the main part of the hotel suite that’s all him. “Lets just relax into it and see what happens.”
The television mounted along the far wall clicks on as he settles into a plush sofa, arm spread out over the back of it.
“We could watch a film,” he suggests like what happened between us this afternoon is the most normal thing in the world.
The muted sound bleeds into the room as he cycles through the channels. I barely notice at first, still caught in the gravity between us.
“What kind of films do you like?” he asks, glancing up at me.
I shrug, open my mouth to reply when his attention is pulled to the television screen.
Then the familiar voice of a popular news anchor fills the space.
“…a surprise ceremony late last night in Las Vegas, where gubernatorial candidate—”
I freeze.
Rurik leans forward like I predator spotting prey.
The camera cuts to footage outside a chapel, bright lights and smiling faces. A man I recognize from billboards and news clipsstands beaming; arm wrapped possessively around a woman at his side.
My breath leaves me in a rush.
She’s elegant. Poised. Her hair is lighter now, styled carefully, her face softened by makeup and good lighting. She looks like money. Like legitimacy. Like a woman who belongs exactly where she’s standing.
But I know those eyes. That face.
I’d know her anywhere.
My heart slams so hard it hurts.
“No,” I whisper.
Rurik doesn’t move, but something in him goes very still.
The reporter continues, cheerful and oblivious. “The bride, who has largely avoided the spotlight, is said to be a private consultant—”
The name they use isn’t hers.
But it doesn’t matter.
“That’s my mother,” I say, the words barely making it past my throat.
Not for the first time today, the room tilts.
A decade of absence. Ten years of silence. Now she’s here, in Las Vegas. Married to a man who wants to be governor of Nevada. Smiling like she didn’t leave a trail of wreckage behind her when she vanished.
“Did you know she was back?” I ask, sinking onto the edge of the sofa before my legs give way completely.
“I suspected,” he says, frowning, and I know he means it. “Michealsson was keeping quiet about a consultant he had been working with, and I’ve spent most of the last forty-eight hourstrying to convince him to clean up his image. Marriage is the quickest, easiest way to do that for a man like him.”
“She has been here all along?” I ask.
