It was hard not to see it as betrayal. That my child could want his comfort instead of mine. That she could be tricked into seeing her father’s killer as a good guy.
I clamped my lips shut and glowered at him, refusing to answer.
Roman stepped in again, quick to read the room.
“Did they hit you?” he asked as he guided me to exit first.
“One slapped me,” I muttered. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing?—”
Andre cut in front of Sergei as we filed out. Roman led me out, and I couldn’t hear what he said, but it seemed that Andre was warning him to shut up.
They all know.
They all have to know.
I furrowed my brow at Roman, feeling so stupid to be “caught” again. To be forced to go with them again. Now that they’d found me, I would be expected to return.
“I left because I learned that Sergei?—”
Roman nodded. He held up his hand to cut me off. “Maybe when Maisie can’t hear,” he whispered.
I appreciated that he’d be delicate about what she was exposed to. But it was all so twisted. And as I exited, refusing to look at the dead bodies on the ground, I struggled to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
They’d killed them all.
To rescue us.
Sergei would kill to save me.
But it couldn’t justify forgiving him for killing Fitz.
“I left because I overheard the guards talking about my late husband.”
Again, he nodded, not denying it.
“For what it’s worth,” he said before glancing over his shoulder to look at his brother and cousin with my daughter a few feet behind us on the stairs, “my condolences, Natalie.”
I scoffed, unable to even process the irony of that.
“I couldn’t face him,” I said, sticking with the present.
“Understandable,” he replied.
“I didn’t know where to go, and those men found us on the street again and kidnapped us.”
He let out a long breath, nodding and listening. I hadn’t expected the youngest Orlov to be such a sounding board, but I was glad he could serve as a buffer between me and his brother. That wasn’t the case for Maisie. She sat on Sergei’s lap in the car the whole ride away from there.
He carried her all the way to her room in his penthouse. And he tucked her into bed. I didn’t trust him anymore. He wouldn’t harm her. Iknewthat. But I couldn’t look at him without this anger. Without this worry.
“Natalie,” he said as he turned to face me. I’d followed her into her room.
Andre and Roman did as well.
“No.” Andre cut in, going to Sergei and guiding him out of the room. “Don’t. Not now.”
As the men argued, with Sergei insisting he needed to speak with me, Andre was the voice of reason. He told him to stop. To let me rest. To back off and not push. Their voices trailed off in the hallway, fading.
