“How could right have ever beenthis?”
She had no idea. But every moment since this morning had been the shortest and longest of her life. She was tongue-tied. She hadn’t said half of what she should have said—to him or to Lucian.
Now she had been kidnapped by a man who hated her, she was pregnant with his baby, everything felt like it was imploding and Lucian might start a war. Lucian. “You know there’s going to be consequences for Basilia.”
“Yes,” he bit out. “I do know that. But I have kept your brother out of this. He knows nothing, nor does he know where we’re going.”
“He’s going to find us.”
“He won’t. We are going to disappear.”
“You seem so confident in that.”
“I am. I am the head of security for a major nation. Do you think that I don’t know how to hide? You think that I do not understand what is at stake? Do you think I did not calculate these risks? Pity that there was one major factor I wasn’t aware of. Your faithlessness.”
She sat down in the chair, shivered. “That isn’t fair. I told you what I would be faithful to. I told you what I was going to do, and why it was essential for me to do it. You knew. You knew what was important to me. You knew that I was fixed on this, that I was doing this for Basilia.”
“Everything changed.”
But why had he only taken her now? Why hadn’t he offered her anything before?
She wanted to cry. Because he was right. Everything had changed. Not just when she had discovered she was pregnant, but from the moment they touched. And now she had fractured them. She was not her mother. She wasn’t brave. She made the wrong choice, and she didn’t know how they could recover from it.
“Are you going to tell me exactly where this plane is taking us?”
“No,” he said.
She didn’t have her phone, anyway, to message anyone. And also, there was no way for her to be tracked. She imagined that was a handy side effect of her being kidnapped straight from the altar. How nice for him.
“You should go and get changed,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. You’re going to catch your death.” She was in a wet wedding dress. It really was quite ridiculous. The fabric was ruined, sodden. Just like everything else.
“I don’t have anything with me.”
“Foolish woman. You think that I took you without making preparation for you? Do you think that I planned to fling you into the sea without providing you with warm clothes?”
He got up and went to the sideboard, took out a bottle of whiskey and poured himself some. “You cannot have any. Therefore, you will have to warm yourself by getting dressed.”
She stood, her hands trembling. “All right. I will.”
She tried to keep her head held high, tried to hang on to some semblance of pride. She didn’t like that he was giving orders and that she was obeying them, but this was an order that she really quite wanted to obey. All things considered. She was freezing. She went into the bedroom at the back of the plane, and opened a closet in there. Turbulence rocked her and the hangers just slightly, and she cursed that she tripped over the wet, sodden dress.
Then she dug through all the clothes, found a pair of sweats and elected to go with those. She had no one and nothing to impress after all.
It was such a funny thing. She had treasured, obsessed over, and loved Andrei for so many years. And yet he had seen her in sweats, pajamas and now nothing. He knew her better than anyone. And now he hated her.
It was an extremely brutal reality that she found herself living in.
She stripped the dress off, her skin clammy, and tossed it into the bathroom that was next to the bedroom. Then she slipped on the sweatpants, the sweatshirt.
And as she was doing so, she had the full realization of what had happened today.
Of what Andrei had done. He had jumped off a cliff into the water with the two of them. He had taken her across the ocean to another island.
He was afraid of the water, even if he would never have said it that way. But he had violated his own rules about the sea, had taken her in the cabin downstairs so that he could be with her, and then had engineered this rescue that should’ve gone against everything he’d designed his life around.
