“What?” I interrupt now, the rage still boiling in my veins at the mere mention of Lysandra. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Nina’s eyes go distant, as if dredging up old memories, and a bitter laugh escapes her lips. “You searched for me for five years, but not once did you care to find out what made me leave in the first place, did you?”
The revelation hit me like a physical blow, sending me stumbling until my back hit the wall, needing it for support.
Because no—I didn’t care.
I was convinced Nina had run away with another man. And even after I learned the truth, there was so much happening that I… never asked.
Between the desperate need to find Kael and his mother and then to become part of my son’s life, it never crossed my mind that there might be another reason for Nina’s disappearance beyond her fear that I would carry out the threat I made years ago and take our child from her.
“What did she do, Nina?” I ask, my eyes locked on hers. “What did Lysandra do?”
She stops pacing and finally turns fully toward me.
“She paid a doctor to offer me money to have an abortion. And then she said it wasn’t the first time she’d done it—that I wasn’t the first woman you got pregnant, nor the first one you proposed to just to keep quiet while you ‘handled the situation.’”
She makes air quotes around the last words, and I lean harder against the concrete behind me.
“She—”
“She showed me recordings of you,” she cuts in. “Audio recordings of you talking to someone, saying that by the end of that week you’d gotten rid of me and the baby—and that if I didn’t cooperate, you’d take the child from me.”
“She doctored the tapes,” I shout, horrified just hearing it. “I never—never said that. That conversation never happened.”
She laughs again.
“And that answer is five years too late, Nero.”
I drag my hands down my face and back through my hair, gripping it until pain sparks.
“I was destroyed in the back seat of a car,” she continues, “and even with all my certainties torn to shreds, I still came back.”
“You came back,” I whisper as every missing piece of Lysandra’s scheme clicks into place—the days Nina disappeared before the photos surfaced, her insistence on talking to me even after I rejected her twice.
Everything fits.
“I came back for you,” she says.
I close my eyes, unable to handle my own pain and hers at the same time—even knowing this is the least I owe her.
“And all I needed, Nero, was for you to tell me exactly that five years ago, and I would have believed you. I would have believed you. I would have left all my fears behind and continued our life exactly where we left off. But you didn’t.”
She shakes her head, tears streaming down her face.
“You believed the lie. You didn’t even give me the chance to explain. You humiliated me, turned me into a pariah in the only place I’d ever called home, and then you promised to take my son from me. And you know what’s worse, Nero?”
She laughs bitterly through her tears.
“Even then, I would have stayed. I would have stayed and tried to live with you—with your hatred—even if it broke me a little more every day. For our son, I would have endured that and much more.”
“But she did more, didn’t she?” I ask, eyes still closed, not daring to wipe away my own tears.
“The day you and your lawyers forced me to go to that appointment on the island, as I was leaving, I was almost run over. And the driver made sure I knew it wasn’t an accident. He gave me a message straight from your mother:The island was no longer a safe place for people like me.”
“So you ran,” I say, opening my eyes.
“So I ran,” she agrees. “I ran for my son’s safety. Because a woman capable of everything I’d already seen Lysandra do to me—to us—was absolutely capable of harming an innocent child. I was alone, in a foreign country, pregnant, with no idea how I’d support the baby inside me. I was alone on an operating table, risking my life, terrified—terrified because if I died, who would take care of my child? My mother is older; she already raised her daughter.”
