Her eyes glitter with anger. “You don’t get to choose how I live my life.”
The jungle sounds hum around us, merciless in their relentless cacophony. I don’t know what to say to her. What words can make this right? How can I make her understand that I just want her to be safe and being associated with me is the opposite of that.
Lucien clears his throat again. “We should move. Time is not our ally.”
Iris nods, turning away before I can stop her. “I’m ready,” she says.
I reach for her, but she gracefully sidesteps me.
Lucien gestures for her to walk toward the back of the house, and she does, without a backward glance.
“For what it’s worth,” Lucien murmurs as he passes me, “you should have told her sooner.”
I glare at him. “How the fuck was I supposed to tell her we were married when I just now found out?”
“No,” he says quietly. “Not that you were married. That you love her.”
I gape at him as he follows Iris.My Iris.
And as he and the woman who I don’t know how to live without disappears from my view, the villa feels crushingly empty.
Just like my heart.
Chapter 11
The tunnel is colder than I expected. After the warmth of Lucien’s house, the cool stone feels like it’s holding the night inside. Or maybe that’s just the darkness filling my heart.
The air smells like earth, old metal, and something faintly bitter. My sandals whisper against the uneven ground as I walk, every sound too loud in my head.
Lucien walks ahead of me with a flashlight. The beam cuts a narrow path through the dark. He doesn’t rush.
That feels deliberate. Like he knows if he moves too fast, I’ll shatter.
I keep expecting Julian to appear behind me.
I anticipate the sound of his boots, the heat of his breath, the comfort of his hand closing around my wrist, steady and unyielding. I want him to tell me to stop, to wait, to not leave him.
But of course that doesn’t happen. I’m foolish for wanting the opposite of what he told me repeatedly would happen. That we would part and never see each other again.
I thought I’d made my peace with it, but the way he reacted when he found out we were married hurt. The way he recoiled at the news of being legally bound to me.
“Careful,” Lucien says softly, interrupting my gloomy thoughts. “The floor dips here.”
“I’m fine,” I reply, out of reflex more than truth.
We continue to walk through the cold tunnels, and now I welcome the chill. It numbs me.
The tunnel slopes downward and then flattens out.
I hug my arms around my ribs because my body feels wrong. It’s heavy and doesn’t feel like part of me any longer. It’s as if I’m watching myself from a few steps back, observing a woman who looks like me walking away from a man who never said goodbye.
No, not just a man. Her husband.
The word presses into my skull, sharp and surreal. I don’t know how to process this information.
Lucien slows and stops near a steel ladder bolted into the rock.
“This is it,” he says. “The pad is above.”
