I jolt wide awake.
Alena.
She’s in a dark coat, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, looking like she stepped out of a car and into my nightmare without so much as smudging her lipstick.
Shock hits so hard I almost forget to breathe. “What are you doing here?”
Her gaze flicks to the monitors, the IV, my face. “I heard you were in here.”
I stare at her. Then I find my voice. “Please leave.”
She doesn’t move.
Instead, she steps closer and lowers her voice. “Listen to me. You’re in danger.”
I laugh once, disbelieving and raw. “No shit.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Get out.”
She looks annoyed by my refusal, which is a truly infuriating expression on someone who has no right to be in my room at all. “I came as soon as I heard,” she says.
“Oh, how touching.”
She ignores that. “I never wanted to hurt him.”
My stomach turns. And then she adds, with a glance at my midsection, “Or his baby.”
For a second I just stare.
Then I scoff. “So this is about Aleksei?”
“That’s not the point,” Alena snaps, impatient now.
“Yes, it is,” I say, because suddenly I am very awake and very tired of beautiful women with expensive coats speaking to me like I’m stupid. “Everything with you is about Aleksei.”
Her jaw tightens. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then enlighten me,” I say. “Preferably while leaving.”
She takes another step, then stops, like she’s just remembered I’m in a hospital bed and might not be as easy to bully lying down. “You need to understand that if something happened to you, it was not my design.”
The wording catches. NotI didn’t do it.NotI had nothing to do with it.
If something happened to you.
I look at her more carefully.
She is not as calm as she wants to seem. “I was told you blamed me,” she says. “That Aleksei blamed me.”
I say nothing. That seems to tell her enough.
She exhales through her nose. “Convenient.”
My pulse shifts. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Alena says, voice low and clipped, “someone is using my name, trying to frame me.”
