Luke grins and sits down behind Aiden’s computer. “I am going to have her before either one of you have any hope of working out where your own asses are.”
Aiden and I leave the room. Aiden shuts the door behind him and locks it.
I lift a brow at him. “We didn’t agree not to sabotage each other,” he says. “I’m about to disconnect the internet and phone, too. Don’t worry. I’ll get the butler to ensure he’s fed and watered.”
“You assholes!” Luke bangs on the door. “Leo! Let me out! If you don’t let me out, there will be hell to fucking pay! And you think Aiden’s not going to fuck you over too? This is against the rules!”
“We never said we couldn’t interfere with one another,” Aiden says. “It’s entirely within the ruleset you agreed to.”
Luke curses. “I’m going to put a fucking hole in this wall if you don’t open the door.”
Aiden puts his hands in his pockets, turns, and walks away. About a minute later, Luke’s foot comes through the wall, much like he promised. He kicks out the drywall, comes crawling through the hole he made, his blond hair getting thoroughly covered in dust.
He lunges at Aiden, who still hasn’t bothered to turn around—rookie error—and starts beating the hell out of him. I take the opportunity to get underway. Aiden is going to be dealing with Luke for a while, I’d say. It’s not often he gets physically attacked, and Luke has been doing nothing but working out since Teddy died.
CHAPTER 16
Ella
The fish and chips are amazing. As are the meat pies. Out in the bay, dolphins are frolicking. I literally cannot believe how beautiful this place is. It feels like I’m being immersed in a world that shouldn’t even exist in the modern day. All the buildings have a colonial style, many of them having been built when the first European settlers arrived. The combined effect is one of being in a place entirely out of time.
I feel, for the first time in my life, something akin to happiness. It’s a strange kind of feeling because I thought happy was getting what or who I wanted, but right now, feeling happy is just feeling like myself in a place where nobody is demanding anything of me, and having everything I need.
My one regret is that I couldn’t bring Ethel. She would have hated the plane, and the quarantine regulations here are so strict I’m almost surprised they let people in at all.
Someone sits down at the picnic bench next to me.
“Enjoying the meal?”
“Took you long enough to find me.”
“I’m just happy you’re eating,” he says.
I still haven’t looked around. Why would I look at anything other than the sun dancing off the gleaming backs of leaping dolphins at play?
“I’m not going back,” I tell him.
“You don’t have to. This country is absolutely packed with the bunkers of the rich and famous. You picked one of the best places you could possibly go. Just like I knew you would.”
“Oh, you knew what I was going to do?”
“I knew you’d run as far away as you could. Antarctica is too cold. This is the next best place.”
I smile to myself ruefully. I suppose it’s a bit of a cliché. I could have gone so many other places. Portugal would have been nice. Or Scotland. Or Norway. Or maybe somewhere in South America. I bet there are places I don’t even know about that would have been better. All I really know is that I haven’t run far enough.
“Where are the others?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “We split up to find you. We are combing the world for you. I’m supposed to bring you back to the house, but we can make this easy. We can get married here.”
“Married, huh. You want to marry the woman who got your brother killed.”
“At some point you are going to have to give up on blaming yourself for that. You didn’t know what was going to happen to him. You were being controlled by someone who had spent years of your life grooming you. You were a victim, and the man who was responsible is long dead. And you can spend the rest of your life believing that you’re a bad person, or you can spend it married, raising babies, and being happy.”
“You want someone who has lived a normal life. You don’t want me. Everything inside me is the wrong way around. I was installed back to front. I don’t trust you, I don’t trust me, and the fact that you followed me across the world to catch up with me—if I was a healthy woman, I’d be terrified.”
I look over at Aiden. His always beautiful face is marred slightly by a set of bruises not entirely covered by sunglasses. I’d ask him what happened, but I can already guess. He got into a fight with one of the others. Luke, probably. Me running away probably pushed Luke to his limits.
“Oh. Well. Let me clarify for you. You should be afraid. We are also put together backwards, as you so eloquently put it. The three of us are obsessed with you. We would do anything to claim you. There is nowhere on this planet you can go that we will not find you. Let me prove it.”
