I grabbed her by the waist and pulled her to myself, my gaze unwavering. “If I find out that you’re lying to me,” I toiled with the strands that framed her face, “you’ll wish you were dead.” The words were spoken with deliberate slowness and the whisper of a psychotic killer.
Fear flashed in her eyes, but she clenched her jaw to mask it. “Don’t threaten me, Adrik.”
It sounded a lot like a warning, the kind that stated she wasn’t to be messed with or underestimated. Strangely, I was drawn to the darkness beneath her eyes and the venom in her voice.
Fascinating!
She added, “I’m not your enemy. The sooner you understand that, the better.”
Moved by her guts and her ability to stand up to me, a mysterious grin tugged at one corner of my mouth. “For your sake, I hope you’re right.”
Her scowl deepened. “You’re not God over me, Adrik Tarasov. Stop acting like you are.” She shoved me aside and walked away, her heels clicking against the floor.
I watched her storm out of the office, slamming the door shut behind her. She was pissed. I liked that.
Chapter 19 – Emika
The next few days passed in a blur, and the mansion felt more and more like a prison. I felt the walls closing in on me. Even something as basic as breathing now felt like a privilege I had to earn.
Security was tightened; guards were everywhere, armed and dangerous. The hallways seemed to echo the boss’s orders every now and then, as though a zombie apocalypse were going on that I didn’t know about.
No one was allowed in or out of the mansion without permission. Not even me. According to Adrik, it was for safety reasons. But I didn’t think so. I thought it was another form of control, a means to exert his dominance over everyone at the house.
He didn’t tell me this, but I’d learned from Natalya that he’d finally killed Richard’s errand boy. She knew this because one of Adrik’s men was her secret boyfriend. She also revealed that the reason he’d tightened security around the house was to prepare for a possible retaliatory attack.
She said that there was no way Richard Beaumont was going to take the death of one of his loyalists lightly. He was going to launch an attack since Adrik had just declared war on him.
That was when it made sense to me why he interrogated the hell out of me the other day. He’d just killed Richard’s loyal man and sent him the body in a box. Adrik knew my grandfather would come for vengeance, so he needed to know where I stood.
All those questions about what I told Richard were his attempts to scrutinize my loyalty. What if he found out that Richard and I had an agreement? What would he do to me? And as for my grandfather, would he really launch an attack on thehousehold where his granddaughter was? Would he attack and risk me getting shot in a crossfire? Was he capable of that?
At this point, these two monsters were capable of anything. For all I knew, Richard might be pissed at me for not reporting anything back to him. He might have concluded that I’d picked a side already. My husband’s.
Considering how selfish he was, what’s to say he’d give two shits whether I lived or died?
I lived in constant fear for my safety and could barely sleep at night. I would wake up at intervals, just to be sure that I was still alive. I knew I couldn’t continue to live like this, afraid of when death would come knocking.
I didn’t want to be trapped in this world of violence anymore. And so, I made it my mission to find a way out of here. Adrik and Richard wouldn’t drag me into their senseless war. I wasn’t going to lose my life over their enmity.
Determined to escape this cursed place, I spent the next few days planning my prison break. Since I couldn’t sleep at night, I used the time to study the guards’ routines.
I memorized their shifts, observed their operational patterns, and found the loopholes I was looking for. When I’d first arrived here, Natalya had shown me around, pointing out all the possible exits in the mansion.
According to her, the one down the basement led to a hidden tunnel that linked the mansion to the woods outside. I hadn’t paid much attention to her at the time because I never planned to escape.
To refresh my memory, I joined Natalya as she was watering the plants two days ago. Since she always loved to talk, I tricked her into telling me more about the tunnel and where it led.
As expected, she didn’t hold back a single detail. Natalya never suspected that I would attempt an escape. She only told me what I needed to know out of the goodness of her kind heart.
I felt bad for playing on her intelligence and using her for my own selfish gain. But this was war, and in war, everything was fair. As a bonus tip, she even told me the exact section of the library where I would find a copy of the mansion’s blueprint.
“You didn’t hear that from me,” she’d whispered in my ear with a harmless grin on her face.
Natalya had no idea how much she’d simplified my escape plan. The night we had that talk, I made my way to the library, testing my knowledge of the guards’ routines. To my surprise, I’d perfectly memorized everything.
When I moved through the dark hallways undetected, I felt like a ninja in action. Like an actual spy. I successfully reached the library, retrieved the blueprint from a shelf, and spread it across a table.
With my phone, I took clear landscape photos of the design before returning it to where I found it.
