She could die.
I didn’t understand how Marco could bear sitting still in the tiny waiting room chair. His face was ashen, his eyes staring at something far away that I couldn’t see.
Inexplicable rage surged. How could he sit there when Ashlyn’s life hung in the balance? How could he hunch his shoulders like he’d already given up on her?
“She’s going to be fine,” I growled at him, even though I didn’t fully believe it. I had to say it out loud, because Marco looked like he was already at her fucking funeral.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “My fault,” he muttered, and I was certain he hadn’t meant to say the words aloud.
In my anger, I caught on to the admission. We weren’t sure who had slipped the poison into my father’s wine, but if Marco knew who was responsible, he’d better spill. If he was holding back on us for some reason, I’d kick his teeth in. Fury coursed through me, desperate for an outlet. Taking it out on the motherfucker who was responsible for this would be a good start.
“What do you mean?” I barked. “Do you know who did this?”
He finally looked at me, his black eyes drawn with anguish. “I did.”
I wasn’t sure what he was playing at or who he was trying to protect, but that simply couldn’t be true. “What do you know about this? Tell me right fucking now, Marco.”
His gaze shifted. His eyes met mine, but he was focused on something I couldn’t see again.
“I did this,” he rasped. “I took her. I brought her into our world.”
“Fuck off,” I seethed. I didn’t need any melodramatic bullshit right now. “You know we didn’t have a choice. She was in danger.”
“She wasn’t. But I took her anyway.”
I froze. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
He blinked and stared at me again, but his eyes were hollow. “You were so unhappy without her. So, I gave her back to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but you’d better start making sense. Snap the fuck out of it. You know our enemies were watching her. They were going to hurt her to get to me.”
“They weren’t,” he said on a strained whisper. “I didn’t know that for sure. I knew it was a possibility they’d been watching you in Cambridge, but there wasn’t a threat against her after you left. Not really.”
My mind churned, struggling to absorb what he was saying. Marco wouldn’t betray me like that. He wouldn’t pull Ashlyn into our world without a good reason. Not when he knew I’d left her behind to protect her.
“But Ricky threatened her at the restaurant when we took her off the estate. He said they had pictures of us together. They’d been watching the estate since we took her.”
“They might have known about your relationship in Cambridge, but they had no reason to think you still cared for her after you left her behind. She probably wasn’t on their radar until I brought her to you.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” I said, still unable to process the depth of his betrayal.
He surged to his feet, getting in my face. “This is my fault, Joseph. Why aren’t you listening to me? It’s my fucking fault. And now she might die. She—”
Whatever he was going to say next was cut off when my fist connected with his jaw. I didn’t hold back, and he reeled at the force of the blow. He staggered and shook his head hard to clear it.
He didn’t tense with aggression. He didn’t take a defensive stance.
He simply stared at me, as though he wanted me to hit him again, to punish him for his unforgivable sin.
“Hey!” A security guard appeared in the waiting room. “Break it up. You’re both going to have to leave.”
Marco rubbed his jaw and turned away from me. “I’m going,” he told the man. “Joseph can stay.”
I watched as he stalked off down the long hallway. My stomach dropped, and my chest hollowed out.
Marco had betrayed me. He’d put the woman I loved in danger, for his own selfish reasons.
No, he’d done it for me.
And that only made his choice that much more inexcusable. He’d made me complicit in this. It was equally my fault that Ashlyn was fighting for her life right now. Because I’d chosen to keep her with me instead of sending her to the police for protection. Marco’s reasoning that we were protecting her was just a flimsy excuse for me to keep her. I’d wanted her to be mine, so I’d taken her.
“Mr. Russo?” A nurse in green scrubs called my name.
She’s not dead, I told myself in the long second it took for the man to speak. She’s not dead.
“Miss Meyers is stable. She’s going to be okay. You can come see her if you want.”