Chapter 8
Iclutch the surface of the table if only to keep from reaching for the necklace hidden beneath my shirt. I know he can see it: the desperation to know more that I can’t even begin to suppress. I picture her. Marnie, beautiful Marnie. Not only was she a victim in the feud, but a cause of it? “How?”
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Mischa scolds. “It wasn’t some petty, romantic squabble. Your mother was meant to pay a price, Little One. A life for a life.”
“Then how was she the first?”
I expect him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. Instead, he extends the silence, reminding me of Robert when he hunted, patiently anticipating the moment his chosen prey would take his bait.
So I bite. “Tell me!”
“Fine. Your Winthorps weren’t always so high and mighty,” Mischa counters. “Years ago, they had an arrangement with themafiya.They ran our accounts, and we protected their interests.”
His subtle inflection betrays what he really means: that his people were the muscle for Robert Sr.
“But your husband’s father got greedy. He thought he could betray us, his allies. Your mother was meant to be his punishment. When she was taken, I’m sure they thought she was dead. So they retaliated.”
With him and his mother? I don’t dare ask. Instead, I remember something else he told me once. Anna-Natalia was number twelve. Was Briar meant to be thirteen?
“You said you traded one life for another,” I say cautiously. From his expression, I can’t anticipate his reaction. I have no choice but to forge on. “Mine? Briar’s? For Anna—”
“Youwere never a damn factor in any of this,” he says, reminding me of my fate: a decoy. How ironic that in both my encounters with him, I was always standing in for someone else. “It was always about Briar.”
But he’s lying.
“So then why didn’t you go after her? In the woods,” I say. “Don’t lie to me by claiming it never happened. I know what I saw.”
It wasn’t a vivid dream after all. Briar was in those woods—and once again, he savedme.
Something flits across his gaze too quickly to name. “I miscalculated,” he says finally and I flinch, caught off guard by the truth. “I thought that you might mean more to him.”
“Either way, you killed him.”
“But if I didn’t?”
My stomach drops as Mischa turns from me, his voice a thoughtful murmur.
“If he lived. Would that make you turn against him, your precious husband? Knowing that he would have let you die as a sacrifice?”
“No.” I’m as surprised by the admission as he seems to be. He whips around, eyeing me with predatory focus. “If Robert chose his sister over me…it would have been him being selfless.”
Briar didn’t carry his secrets. She couldn’t warm his bed.
She never carried his seed.
“Selfless?” Mischa’s thumb grazes my cheek and I jump. He’s frowning again. Confused? “To let you die for him?”
“No.” I shrug him off. “Because he would have finally let me go—”
“Mischa?”
We both turn to the doorway and find Vanya standing there.
Warily, his gaze darts between the two of us. “Your…input is needed,” he says, wording the phrase carefully.
To hide something, I suspect.
From me.