“Is he dead?” I ask finally, my voice catching. “Did you kill him?”
Liam’s jaw tightens, and I see the muscle there leaping as he considers his answer. The hesitation makes my heart skip a beat in my chest, clenching with premature grief as I imagine theyesthat must be coming, the certain knowledge that Alexandre,myAlexandre, is dead.
“Why do you care?” Liam asks finally, an edge to his voice that I hadn’t heard before. “Jesus, Anastasia, why? The manboughtyou. He owned you like a piece of property. He hurt you, he forced me to—” he runs both of his hands through his hair then, turning sharply away so that his back is to me, and I see his shoulders heaving as he drops his hands to his sides, clenching them into fists.
Several seconds pass before he turns to face me again. I can hear my own heartbeat in each one, waiting for him to answer, and despite myself, I start to cry. Slow tears at first, dripping hotly down my cheeks, and then faster, until they’re streaming, sobs that I have to bite back until the tears are running off of my chin, pooling in the seam of my lips.
Liam flinches visibly when he turns back around and sees me there, crying silently with my hands clenched in the duvet I’m still holding against my chest. “No,” he says finally. “I didn’t kill him. As far as I know, Alexandre Sartre is not dead—though I wish toGodhe was!”
His last exclamation only makes me cry harder, and Liam shakes his head, coming around the foot of the bed to stride towards me, his face flushing with visible frustration. “I wish I’d killed him,” he growls savagely. “I wish I’d shot him in the fucking heart for daring to take you, for doing what he did, for forcing me to do those things to you. But getting you out, making sure you weresafe, was more important. Do you understand me, Ana? Do you understand what I’ve done to save you, what I—”
His voice is rising, and it sparks the panic in my chest, rising up hot and thick. I can feel myself starting to tremble, and I shake my head wildly as he comes towards me, feeling myself start to spiral.
“No!” I scream, scrambling away from him. “No, fucking get away from me! Get away!”
As long as I live, I’ll never forget the look on his face when I scream that. It’s a look I’ve never seen on any man’s face except Alexandre’s.
I know it very well, because I’ve seen that look on my own face in the mirror.
Somewhere between the garden in the safe house and this hotel room, Liam McGregor has become a broken man.
2
LIAM
It’s all I can do not to be furious with her. Her questions about whether Paris and Alexandre were real had shocked me, but I’d been warned she was broken. After all that’s happened to her, it’s hard to blame her or be off-put by it. That, in and of itself, hadn’t bothered me.
It was when she’d started defending Alexandre that I’d wanted to reach across the bed and shake her.
I didn’t, of course. I’d never do such a thing, and besides, I know it wouldn’t help matters. It would only upset her more, but I can’t understand why she cares if he’s alive or dead. He’d bought her from Alexei, held her captive in his apartment, and though I haven’t seen any physical damage, who knows what else he did to her?
He let his friend—girlfriend?—hold a gun to her head and forced me to have sex with Ana. That horrible woman had forced me to make her come, and together, they’d taken away something that had meant something to me, with Ana. No matter what happens between us now, we’ll never have another first time together. The first time we had sex will always be a forced event at gunpoint. The first time I made her come, the first time I heard her gasp and moan as she clenched around me, will always be because I was forced to do it. Because she was forced to let me.
How do we come back from that? How could anyone? It doesn’t matter if we stay basically strangers, if we become friends, if we sleep together again, if we get married and stay together for the rest of our lives—thatwill always exist. There’s no escaping from it, no running away, no way to make it vanish. I tried to save her—and I have, in terms of getting her away from Alexandre. But I couldn’t keep him from hurting her and using me to do it. That’s a taint on our relationship that can’t ever be healed, as far as I can see.
Hearing her defend him, hearing her ask if he’s dead, seeing her fuckingcryfor him makes me want to reach out and shake sense in her, to scream at her that he was a monster, that any man who would buy a woman for any reason other than to rescue her and immediately let her go home is exactly that and nothing less. That a man who would do what he did to her at that dinner party deserves to die.
I meant it when I’d said I wished I’d killed him. If I’d had more time, I would have. I’ll go to my grave regretting that I left Alexandre Sartre breathing and bleeding on his dining room floor.
But I’d also meant it when I’d said that getting her to safety was more important. I would have done anything, given anything, endured anything if it meant rescuing her.
Which was why seeing the panic in her face and hearing her scream at me to get away cut me to the bone, changing my anger almost entirely to grief, making me feel as if she’s stabbed me in the heart.
It’s not as if I can’t understand it, though. Less than twenty-four hours ago, I was inside of her, being forced to fuck her on someone else’s dining room table with a gun inches away at her head and an audience. It’s clear she doesn’t want to admit Alexandre is the monster in this situation, so it makes sense that she’d choose me to be afraid of—the person who actually did it to her.
I wish more than anything that I could go back and do things differently. Accept Levin and Max’s offer to go in with me, not be so prideful, so insistent that I could handle it myself. I wish I could go back and tell myself that my need to be her one and only savior would only bring us both unimaginable grief and pain.
But it’s done, and I have to live with it.
At least she’s safe. He’ll never touch her again.
And most likely, neither will I.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, feeling my shoulders slump as I look at her. “I’m sorry for what happened, Ana. I had no idea he’d pull something like that. I couldn’t have imagined it. My plan—”
“You had a plan?” Ana spits the words out, and it’s all I can do not to flinch back. “You came in gun practically blazing, assuming what? He’d be so afraid of you that he’d let you scoop me up and leave? The big bad Irish King?”
Each one of her words cuts deep, but I let it. I can understand her anger and hurt—I’m also angry with myself. And a part of me is almost glad to see her fight back. The girl I met in Russia had no fire left in her, but this version of Ana, the one that would yell at me like that, does. This seems more like the woman that Sofia showed me. “Alexandre violated us both, Ana. I’m angry too—”