Chapter 4
Nico, in the passenger seat, reloaded his gun with calm, bloody fingers. A cut ran down his cheek.
“Nico.”
He looked back.
“To him.”
The world narrowed.
“No.”
“He gave one order regarding you,” Nico said. “If found alive, bring you home.”
“I don’t have a home.”
“He never believed you were dead.”
“I wanted him to.”
Nico’s face hardened. “That nearly made him mad.”
“Good.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Not anger. Not pity. Maybe memory.
“You don’t know what happened that night.”
Evelyn laughed once, sharp and empty. “I know what I saw.”
“No,” Nico said quietly. “You know what someone wanted you to see.”
The words crawled beneath her skin.
She turned away.
“I saw my husband with my sister.”
Nico’s gaze shifted toward the windshield. “Chloe Cross disappeared two days after you did.”
Evelyn went still.
The rain seemed to stop making sound.
“What?”
“Marcus tore the city apart looking for both of you. He found your coat by the East River. Blood on the sleeve. Your wedding ring in the mud.”
Evelyn’s hand flew to her bare finger.
Her ring.
She had left it on the marble table by the front door before walking out into the rain.
“I didn’t—”
“I know.” Nico’s voice was grim. “Someone staged your death after you left.”
Evelyn’s mouth went dry.
The twins stared at her, frightened and confused.
“What happened to Chloe?” Evelyn asked.
Nico did not answer quickly enough.
“What happened to my sister?”
“She was found six months later in Lisbon, using a false name and spending money from an account tied to one of Marcus’s enemies.”
“No.”
“She claimed Marcus attacked her. Then she vanished again before anyone could question her.”
Evelyn shook her head. “No. Chloe wouldn’t—”
But memory betrayed her.
Chloe borrowing Evelyn’s dresses without asking.
Chloe smiling too sweetly at Marcus across dinner.
Chloe crying on Evelyn’s sofa one week before the wedding, saying, You always get chosen first.
No.
Not this.
Not that.
The SUV sped through the storm toward a private airfield.
Evelyn held her children tighter.
“Please,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she was speaking to Nico, God, or the dead version of herself she had buried years ago. “Don’t take them to him.”
Nico looked back once.
For the first time, his loyalty seemed to hurt him.
“He already knows.”
The jet waited under white floodlights.
Evelyn almost fought. She wanted to. She imagined clawing Nico’s face, running across the runway with a child under each arm, vanishing into the black line of trees beyond the fence.
Then Leo sneezed.
Lily’s lips had gone blue from cold.
And behind them, somewhere in the rain, men who were not Marcus’s had shot through a bookstore window while her children sat ten feet away.
So Evelyn boarded the plane.
The flight to New York lasted less than an hour.
It felt like a lifetime being lowered into a grave.
The twins slept eventually, curled against each other beneath a cashmere blanket someone had placed over them. Evelyn did not sleep. Nico sat across from her, silent, gun resting against his thigh.
At one point she asked, “Did Marcus send men after me?”
“Yes.”
“To drag me back?”
“At first.”
“And then?”
Nico looked at the sleeping children. “Then to find a body.”
Evelyn pressed her lips together.
“He thought you were dead, Evelyn. Not gone. Dead.”
She looked out at the dark clouds below.
“He should have explained,” she said.
Nico’s expression tightened. “He tried.”
She remembered her phone ringing in the taxi. Marcus’s name flashing over and over. She had thrown it into a storm drain without answering.
“He should have come after me himself.”
“He did.” Nico leaned forward. “That night, when he realized you were gone, Marcus left the house with blood on his shirt and no shoes. We found him three miles away, tearing through traffic on foot like a man possessed.”
Evelyn’s chest constricted despite herself.
“I don’t care.”
May you like
“You do.”
She turned on him with sudden fury. “Don’t tell me what I feel. I built a life out of fear and silence while he remained in his mansion, surrounded by men willing to kill for him.”
