He turns to face me and brushes my hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ears. His eyes are warm and beautiful as he looks down at me with a gentle smile on his lips.
My heart flutters as I smile up at him.
“Everything will be okay, little bunny. I’ll make sure of it,” he says, his hands brushing over the sides of my neck. He pauses, and his eyes flash with light just before he kisses me.
It’s soft, slow and sensual.
It’s not urgent or lustful like before.
This is different. It’s so intimate, it’s making my skin tingle.
My emotions are flooding me again, so I pull away from him, trying to get control of myself.
“I’ll make you coffee,” I say, stepping around him and picking up two mugs. “But how will you survive drinking out ofsome random mug and not your favorite one?” I tease him to ease the tension.
He stands behind me and wraps his arms around me this time, resting his chin on my head for a moment, he sighs deeply.
“I think I’ll manage. You do make really good coffee, so it should be alright.”
I giggle and lean back into him.
We carry our coffee to the sofa that’s facing the dark ocean, and after Andrei has settled into it, I snuggle against his side.
“Who is Grigoriy?” I ask, knowing he’ll guess I overheard them talking.
“A very good friend that I lost,” he says sadly.
“I don’t think it was your fault, Andrei. Sometimes bad things happen in life and it’s out of our control.”
“That might be true, but there are things that are also in our control, and those are the things I need to focus on now.”
He falls quiet for a long time.
I have so many things I want to say to him. I decide that the most important this in this moment is to say at least a small bit of what’s in my heart.
“Thank you for bringing me here. This place is incredible. And being here with you—it’s incredible, too.” I smile, pressing my face against his shoulder as I stare out into the night, thinking about Andrei and what he means to me.
It’s scary to admit it, but I think I’m in love with him.
We talk until late in the night, and we’re both yawning and exhausted. Andrei falls asleep on the sofa, but I gently wakehim up and lead him upstairs to bed. Instantly, he’s asleep again when his head touches the pillow. I pull the blanket over him, and while I would love to snuggle up next to him and sleep too, my mind is too busy. I desperately want to figure out a way to fix everything.
I tiptoe quietly downstairs, make a cup of tea, and carry it out onto the lower balcony to look up at the stars. There are so many of them. They make me feel small and they quiet my heart.
What am I going to do next?
At this point, I’m not really a prisoner anymore. It was easy to use his phone. It would be easy to slip away. But I don’t want that.
I want to stay with Andrei.
Soon, we’ll be flying back to Boston, back home, back to the city. At that point, I should have had a plan in place to keep us both safe.
I no longer know what my half-brother is capable of and from the reality check I just had, nothing good can happen if he’s involved.
“Don’t scream, Tia,” a deep, familiar voice grates through the air.
I spin in fright to face Van, clasping my hand over my mouth.
It was he following us. All this time, it was him, and my instincts were right.
