Zoella’s skin was pale in the light of the he morning, as if blood had been drained from her body. Her cheekbone had a scratch on it, too, pink and new.
I ran my fingers over it softly. Her skin twitched at the contact, and I dropped my hand before I hurt her any more than she already was, turning away.
I couldn’t trust myself to speak.
The air between us crackled.
She was okay. The baby was fine. But the fact didn’t douse the fires burning in my chest; it wasn’t enough. Not after seeing her like that, battered, bruised, afraid, hunted like an animal.
She could have been killed.
My child could have been killed.
“You ran,” I blurted out, finally, continuing the conversation from when I found her. “You knew you were pregnant, yet you chose to run away.”
Her head lifted a little, but she said nothing.
“That was risky,” I said, my voice low and gentle. She’d been through enough, and the last thing I wanted was to scare her. “You’re pregnant. Alone. No security. What were you thinking,kotyonok?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said harshly, her voice rough.
My jaw clenched. “Then what do you want me to call you? The woman who vanished in the dead of night after drugging her husband and leaving him half-dead on the floor?”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t play the victim, and you were asleep, not half-dead.”
I inched closer. “You think I care about me right now?”
“Then what?” she hissed. “You care about the baby? About the one I didn’t even know if you would want me to keep?”
Her words cut like a blade.
Her hand trembled as she pushed a stray strand of brown hair behind her ear. She was exhausted. Wounded. Hurt in ways I couldn’t heal, even if I was dying to take away every pain and every dreadful memory she had.
“You took a risk. You put our child in danger. And then what do you want? For me to just pretend it never happened?”
She stood up, her chest heaving. “You don’t get to talk about risk like you weren’t the one I had to escape from in the first place.”
I blinked once.
Then she burst into tears as she went on. “You think I ran away because I was scared to be a mother? A wife to you?”
Her eyes filled up with tears, but she managed to keep them from streaming down her face.
“I ran away because I heard you talk with Damien about Yulia. My sister was murdered, and you knew, all of you knew.”
Her name hit the room.
I did not move.
She stepped closer. “You know who killed her and how she died, didn’t you?”
My throat closed up. “No, I’m still trying to—”
“Then you suspected someone in the family killed her at the very least.” Her voice clicked into gear. “And you still brought me home to that house. You still married me.”
I remained silent.
“I watched my sister become a shadow of herself,” she whispered through a cracked voice. “Piece by piece until there was nothing. Nothing at all.”
