Kage drops the shotgun and flies across the room, falling to his knees next to me and cupping my face in his hands.
“Baby. Baby, talk to me. Are you hurt? Natalie, look at me. Look at me.”
Dazed, I rip my gaze from the headless remains of Viktor and focus on Kage.
I whisper brokenly, “Maxim…the money…my parents…you k-killed him…”
He gathers me into his arms and holds me tight. He kisses my head. Into my ear, he says, “You’re okay. Everything is okay. I’m here. Stand up.”
He tries to help me up, but my legs are useless. I sag against him, numb. He picks me up and carries me to the sofa, setting me down gently and smoothing my hair back from my face.
Standing over me, he says, “I need to take care of the body. Stay right here. Understand?”
I blink slowly, nodding, not understanding anything at all.
He kisses my forehead. Then he straightens, goes over to Viktor, rolls him up in the living room rug, hoists him over his shoulder, and carries him out the back door.
Watching them go, Mojo whines from his hiding place under the coffee table.
I don’t know how long it is before Kage returns. It seems like only a few minutes, but it could be hours. Days. Weeks. When he comes back in, he kneels on the floor in front of me. He takes my hands in his.
I try not to think about how much blood must be on them and focus on his face instead.
“Tell me what happened.”
I swallow, closing my eyes to banish the image that keeps playing on rewind of Viktor’s head exploding.
In a dull voice that sounds far away to my own ears, I say, “I got a phone call from Maxim. He said you’d betrayed him. Disobeyed him. He mentioned my parents. He said we all had to pay for how I turned you against him. Then Viktor was here. He asked where the money was. I told him about the trust you set up for me.
“Then he…he was weird. He wanted to know where you lived. If we’d been in contact. He acted like you weren’t working for Maxim anymore. I didn’t understand what he meant. Then it didn’t matter because he was going to shoot me. I tried to run…Mojo bit him…then it all happened so fast…”
I open my eyes. Kage kneels in front of me, squeezing my hands, looking anguished.
Looking guilty.
“Why did he come? What did you do? What’s happened?”
He’s silent for a moment, then he releases my hands and stands. He turns away, walks a few steps, stops, then turns back.
His expression has wiped blank. When he speaks, his voice is hollow.
“He came for the money. Like I did.”
I stare at him. It suddenly feels very hard to form words. “Like you did? I don’t understand.”
When he stays silent, I prompt, “You mean he wanted the trust money you gave me?”
“No.”
“Then what money was he talking about?”
The way he’s looking at me is frightening. There’s a deadness in his eyes, an ending, but I don’t know what it means.
He says quietly, “The one hundred million dollars your fiancé stole from Max.”
My wildly beating heart falls deathly still.
Once, when I was ten years old, I jumped off the highest diving platform at the community pool. Sloane dared me to do it, so of course I did.
I meant to do a cannonball, because that was fun and splashy. But I fucked it up, releasing my legs too soon and tumbling forward so I landed flat against the surface of the water.
Face, chest, belly, thighs—they hit together, all at once.
The impact was violent. It knocked the breath out of me. It hurt like fire, like I’d been slapped against frozen asphalt by a giant hand and shattered every bone in my body.
I was paralyzed. Every inch of my skin burned.
Stunned, agonized, I drifted facedown toward the bottom of the pool until Sloane jumped in and saved me.
Until David disappeared, that was the worst pain I’d ever felt.
I feel it again now, that hard-slapped breathlessness. That shattered, suffocating pain.
I whisper, “My dead fiancé? David?”
Kage pauses. Looks at me with those empty, goodbye eyes.
“His name isn’t David. It’s Damon. And he’s still alive.”
