I stare at her. For a second, I don’t say anything, because that is not what I expected her to say. I expected denial. Deflection. Something elegant and slippery that I’d have to pry apart later.
Not that. Not something so direct.
She watches my face carefully, as if trying to measure whether I’m even capable of considering this.
“You expect me to believe that?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I expect you to be intelligent enough to at least entertain it.”
That should annoy me. It does.
But not enough to stop me from thinking.
Because the worst part is, it makes sense. Too much sense. Alena was the obvious answer. The easy one. The ex. The woman already tangled up in Aleksei’s past, with enough motive and enough bitterness to make everyone stop looking once her name surfaced.
And if someone wanted Aleksei furious and pointed in the wrong direction, they could not have picked a cleaner target.
I look at her more closely.
She’s still composed. Still dressed like she stepped out of a luxury car and into some rich-person disaster. But there’s something off around the edges. Tension in her jaw. A tightness in her shoulders she’s trying hard to hide. Her eyes keep flicking toward the door, not because she’s bored, but because she’s measuring escape.
Then it hits me. She’s scared. Not of me. Of him.
Of what Aleksei might do to her if he truly believes she tried to hurt me.
That realization changes the air between us. Not enough to make me trust her. Not even close. But enough to make me understandthat whatever game she usually plays, she is not fully in control of it right now.
“You really think he believes it was you,” I say slowly.
Her mouth tightens. “Of course, he does.”
There’s no vanity in it. No flattery. Just fact.
And that, more than anything, tells me she knows him well enough to be afraid.
“He should,” I say, because I’m not about to let her off that easily. “You did plenty.”
A flash of irritation crosses her face. “Yes. I manipulated. I pressed. I used what I knew. I wanted you gone from his life, not dead in a hospital bed.”
The bluntness of it makes me go still.
She sees that and presses on. “Do you think I would be standing here if I believed he had actual proof?” she asks. “Do you think I would walk into this room if I thought he was finished deciding whether to destroy me?”
The door stays closed. The room hums softly around us. Neither of us moves.
“You should leave,” I say at last.
Her expression goes flat again, the fear tucked back under that smooth exterior. “Probably.”
But she doesn’t move immediately. She studies me for one last moment, as if deciding whether to say more. Then she says, quieter now, “You need to understand something. If he thinks this was me, he won’t stop at retaliation. He’ll make it personal.”
The words should comfort me.
Instead, they don’t. Because I already know that. I saw it in his face.
“And if it wasn’t you?” I ask.
Alena’s eyes hold mine. “Then someone very clever is counting on exactly that.” The words are barely out of Alena’s mouth when something moves behind her.
