“I’m serious.”
“I know.” I drag my thumb over her hip once. “Publicly, my father married my mother. Privately, he never ended things with Vera.”
“Okay…” She slowly lifts her head from my chest.
“Wait.”
I meet her eyes.
“Vasilisa isn’t my cousin,” I say. “She’s my half-sister.”
Ayla blinks. Once. Twice.
“Damn.”
I huff a laugh.
“Well,” she says after a second, settling back down, “if it helps, you treat your half-sister better than my half-brother treats me.”
That hits me wrong and right at the same time. I chuckle anyway.
“There are two of them.”
“Two?”
“Vasilisa has a younger sister. Mimi.”
“Where is she?”
“Andras Academy.”
Ayla frowns. “I don’t know what that is.”
“You don’t need to.”
That answer doesn’t satisfy her. I can tell by the way her fingers pinch lightly at my side.
But she lets it go.
For now.
The woods go quiet again.
Her hand drifts over my chest again. Over the scars my father gave me and the heart he never managed to kill.
After a while, she says, softer now, “We have really fucked up families.”
I stare up at the moon and don’t answer.
Because that’s the part of the story I still don’t know how to mend.
So instead, I tighten my arm around her waist and keep her there in the dirt with me, under the trees, where for one impossible minute everything in me feels split open and soothed at the same time.
Chapter 48
Maksim
Four Months Later
