KATIE
Roan walks out of the office with his father cradled in his arms, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do but stand there, useless and heartbroken, watching him disappear down the hallway like some vital part of me is being dragged away with them.
I know that look on his face. The way his jaw is clenched tight enough to crack teeth. The way his shoulders are locked rigid, holding everything in with iron control. He’s in shock—I’ve seen it before,livedthrough it myself, and I know he’s not going to let himself feel a single thing until he’s done handling all the practical matters.
Not until the doctor officially confirms it. Not until the funeral is planned. Not until every arrangement is made and every loose end is tied up around the estate. And afterwards, when everything is finally done and the adrenaline keeping him upright wears off—that’s when the grief will hit him, and it’s going to hit hard.
When it does, I hope to God he has someone with him. Someone to make sure he doesn’t lock it all up so deep that it eats him alive from the inside out.
The way it’s been eating me for years…
I slap a hand over my mouth as a sob rips out of me—raw, sudden, with zero warning or permission. Then suddenly, fingers clamp down on my shoulders, and I flinch back, my head jerking up.
Dhimitër.
His grip is bruising and his eyes burn holes through me. “What a great actress you are,” he sneers.
“W–what?” My voice shakes with genuine confusion, heart still hammering from shock and grief and now fear.
“We’ll find out what you did later,” he snaps, fingers digging harder into my shoulders. “But for now, you’re coming with me.”
No. No, this isn’t?—
Before I can form a coherent protest, he yanks me up by the arm and drags me out of the office. I try to resist, try to ask what’s happening, but he doesn’t care about anything I have to say. He just pulls me along mercilessly, out of the main house, across the courtyard, to one of the buildings I’ve only ever seen from a distance since arriving here—one that’s always guarded, always locked, the place Roan ordered him to take Frederik weeks ago.
Thefrigorifer.
Oh God.
He unlocks the door and shoves it open, and the cold hits me instantly.
It’s freezing. The kind of cold that goes straight to your bones.
I don’t have time to protest or fight back. He drags me inside the dark space and roughly cuffs me to a metal chair that’s bolted to the concrete floor, then leaves without saying another word.
“Wait. Please wait.”
But the door slams shut behind him with terrible finality, and I’m plunged into complete darkness and crushing silence.
The cold is even more unbearable without the distraction of his anger.
My teeth clatter so hard the sound bounces off the walls, my hands shaking uncontrollably on the metal armrests as I try to make sense of what just happened.
They found me with Afrim’s body.
Do they think I killed him? Or maybe that I did something to upset him so badly it triggered a heart attack? What the hell?
Will Roan think that?
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Tears spill down my face, and I can’t even lift my hands to wipe them away. They freeze against my skin almost instantly, hardening into icy tracks that makes me even colder, even more numb.
I should be focused on getting out of here somehow. On what I’ll say when they inevitably come back to interrogate me. On how I’m going to survive this nightmare. But all I can think about is Roan and whether he believes I did this. Whether he believes I betrayed him, that everything between us has been a calculated manipulation leading to this moment.
It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Iamgoing to betray him—that’s always been the plan. So I shouldn’t care what he thinks about me or whether he trusts me.
But I do. And that’s the part that terrifies me the most.
