Chapter Nine
THEY WERE DROWNING. Together. He didn’t know which way was up. He didn’t particularly care. For a moment, he just let it all not… Hurt.
And then, his body sprung into action.
He began to swim them both toward the surface of the water. Up and up, to where he had the small boat moored against the side of the rock.
He had given up all his honor for this. For them. He had gone to the darkest place inside him to claim her as his. This might be sharp, hard, she might be angry that he’d thwarted her, but he could not allow her to give herself to another man.
He’d thought he could.
But he was his father’s son.
He’d run from that all his life, until he’d needed to run to it. And now he was embracing it. Along with his fury. She should have felt the same way. She shouldn’t have been able to go through with it—as he hadn’t been able to allow it.
She hadn’t, and he was angry about that.
But he had her now. And no matter how angry he was now, he wouldn’t let her go.
Not ever.
He hauled them both into the boat, starting up the motor and moving them away from the coastline as quickly as possible.
“Are you insane?” she sputtered, her white dress in tatters, her hair a wreck.
“Yes,” he said.
“You could’ve killed us both.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You could have. You could have… And the baby.”
He froze. “The baby?”
“That’s why you came for me, isn’t it?”
“What baby, Emerald?”
She was waxen already, utterly pale, but all the remaining color flooded away from her face as she stared at him. “You didn’t know?”
“No. I didn’t fucking know. I still don’t. Tell me. Now.”
“I… Andrei, I’m pregnant.”
Rage. Rage and this crushing, relentless pain in his chest was all he knew.
She was pregnant with his baby, and she had been planning on marrying Lucian? Had been planning to give not just herself, but his child to another man.
It changed everything.
This had been about them. He’d been wounded that she’d been able to let it go so far, that she had kept walking toward this inevitability while he had broken.
In the stillness of the night, the ghost of his father had visited him. In the form of his own disgust. And it demanded to know why any son of the Ardelean crime family would behave with such cowardice. Would put the greater good over what he wanted. Needed. Deserved.
But now things had taken an even darker turn. Her willingness to marry another, and now the realization that she’d been trying to pass his child off as another man’s, made a mockery of them. Everything they were. Everything they had ever been.
He had been the one to go back on his word by taking her, by not allowing her to do what she felt was right, was her duty.
And he had felt weak for that. But knowing now that she was pregnant with his child, knowing now that she had intended to pass that child off as belonging to another man, all of his illusions, and his guilt, shattered.
“I signed an agreement.”
“When did you find out?” The salt air was in his face, the spray of the sea lapping up against the boat, and it was not fear he felt now. Rage.
“I…” Her teeth were chattering, and had he been in a different mood, had it been a different moment in time, he would have done everything he could to keep her warm.
But everything had changed in the space of a breath. From the time they had gone beneath the surface, to when they had come up. Nothing was the same, and it never would be again.
“Did you even go to bed with me, say goodbye to me, knowing that you were pregnant with my child, withholding this information from me?”
“No,” she protested. “Andrei, of course I didn’t know.
I found out this morning. I realized that I never had my…
I realized that I was late. Ever since the yacht, and I hadn’t thought about it because everything has been mixed up since that day.
I didn’t know. I had very little time to figure out what I was going to do. You were gone.”
“I would have answered your call.”
“I know that. But I thought that when I told Lucian…”
“He knows?”
“Yes. I told him.”
“And he decided to steal my child?”
She nodded. “He needs an heir. He said that it didn’t matter to him because… He’s been married twice, and neither of his wives has lived long enough to produce heirs. He thought that it was convenient that I was pregnant already.”
“Then he is a monster. But so are you.”
She said nothing more. Her unwillingness to fight him, her lack of desire to explain herself, spoke volumes.
There was no sound, only the motor of the boat, the crash of the waves.
They weren’t being pursued. It would be a very slow trek to the island of Marake, where he had arranged air transport for them.
They had three hours in this boat, and frankly, if Lucian realized that they had taken to the sea, he would be able to overtake them in just about any air- or watercraft he chose.
Andrei had to continue to hope that it didn’t occur to him.
And that if Onyx were to give any guidance, even genuine guidance, he would say that Andrei would never take to the sea.
But he didn’t know. He did not know the ferocity of his feelings for Emerald, nor the things that had happened on the water in these past weeks.
The way that it had changed him.
“Where are we going?” Her teeth were chattering; she had been silent for what felt like an hour.
“Somewhere warmer than this.”
The journey on the water was brutal. Emerald’s stomach was churning by the time they got off the boat, and she found herself bundled onto a private jet.
“How do you have… Access to this?”
Andrei turned to her, his expression severe. “You think I do not have money of my own? Do you think I have not taken what your brother has paid me and made investments? You truly do think me common.”
“I don’t, I…”
She was miserable. She should be ecstatic.
Andrei had come for her. She was pregnant with his baby.
But this was like being on the other side of the looking glass.
As if she had stood there, seen her dream and fallen down into the other side, been presented with a backward, twisted version of the thing that she had always wanted.
Because she had hurt him. She could see it. He was furious in a cold, frightening way. She wasn’t sure that they would ever recover from it.
The truth was, what she’d done had been a decision made in shock.
Likely, she would’ve come to her senses at some point, but everything would’ve been more complicated.
It was a narrow escape, this brush with marriage to the wrong man, but now she had fallen out of the frying pan and into the churning waves.
“I really didn’t have time to think—”
“I was going to take you. Regardless. I had no idea about the child.”
He sat down in a plush, leather chair, forearms rested on the arms, his legs spread wide. He was wet, and furious. She stood, unwilling to sit down, unable to. Her whole body was trembling.
“If you do not sit when we prepare for takeoff, you will fall over.”
She did sit then.
“I could not give you to him. But I had no idea what a treacherous woman you were. Still, all the better that I did take you, or I would have been denied my child. I have lost all of my family, Emerald, and you would take my child from me too.”
“I didn’t think of that. I didn’t… I didn’t think.”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t think of anyone but yourself.
Your legacy, is that not correct? That is all you think of.
The way that you will be written about in the history books.
Well, I don’t know about the history books, but what happens today will surely be written about in headlines the world over.
And our child will be able to read those headlines.
What do you think they will make of them? ”
She wasn’t sure that it mattered, because she didn’t know she was going to survive this. She didn’t know if she was going to survive any of this. It also wasn’t true.
“It isn’t about what they write about me. I wanted to do the right thing,” she said.
“How could right have ever been this?”
She had no idea. But every moment since this morning had been the shortest and longest of her life. She was tongue-tied. She hadn’t said half of what she should have said—to him or to Lucian.
Now she had been kidnapped by a man who hated her, she was pregnant with his baby, everything felt like it was imploding and Lucian might start a war. Lucian. “You know there’s going to be consequences for Basilia.”
“Yes,” he bit out. “I do know that. But I have kept your brother out of this. He knows nothing, nor does he know where we’re going.”
“He’s going to find us.”
“He won’t. We are going to disappear.”
“You seem so confident in that.”
“I am. I am the head of security for a major nation. Do you think that I don’t know how to hide? You think that I do not understand what is at stake? Do you think I did not calculate these risks? Pity that there was one major factor I wasn’t aware of. Your faithlessness.”
She sat down in the chair, shivered. “That isn’t fair. I told you what I would be faithful to. I told you what I was going to do, and why it was essential for me to do it. You knew. You knew what was important to me. You knew that I was fixed on this, that I was doing this for Basilia.”
“Everything changed.”
But why had he only taken her now? Why hadn’t he offered her anything before?
She wanted to cry. Because he was right.
Everything had changed. Not just when she had discovered she was pregnant, but from the moment they touched.
And now she had fractured them. She was not her mother.
She wasn’t brave. She made the wrong choice, and she didn’t know how they could recover from it.
“Are you going to tell me exactly where this plane is taking us?”
“No,” he said.
She didn’t have her phone, anyway, to message anyone. And also, there was no way for her to be tracked. She imagined that was a handy side effect of her being kidnapped straight from the altar. How nice for him.