Chapter 49
Sabine
“So,we’re going to just fuck it all away?”
Despite the incredible sex we just had, I find myself irritated that I allowed my lust for Astor to circumvent the problem, once again.
He rises onto his elbow and looks down at me, naked on the hardwood floor. “What do you mean?”
“I asked what we were going to do about us, and instead of answering me, we had the kind of sex that I’m pretty sure is illegal in most countries.”
“You didn’t seem to mind it when you were screaming my name.”
“I’m not being funny. I’m asking, are we just going to fuck away this gray area of us, or worse, pretend it doesn’t exist? And then what? Go back to our regular lives?”
He sweeps a strand of hair behind my ear. “Be patient with me.”
“Be patient with you?” I gawk, feeling heat rise up my neck. “Are you serious?”
I push off the floor and begin yanking on my clothes. My cheeks burn with embarrassment.
Astor stands, his naked body glorious. “Sabine, stop. Come here.”
I swat away his advance and begin pacing. “I still have so many questions, and you just want sex. Geez, Astor, you are so incapable of handling anything serious that involves actual communication.”
“Sabine, please.” He slips on his boxer shorts.
God, why does he have to be so damn sexy?
Stop, stop, stop.
“Who is Prishna?” I glare. “Who is she really?”
Astor stills.
“Aha.” I jab a finger into the air. “I knew it. I found a death certificate with her name on it hidden in her suitcase.”
“You’ve been doing a lot of snooping.”
“Of course I have. I’m bored out of my damn mind. Answer my question—and I also want to know all about your wife, your marriage, everything.”
He blows out a long breath. “This is going to require another drink, then.”
After grabbing a bottle from the bar cart, Astor refills his wineglass and tops off mine. Then he sinks back onto the loveseat and crosses one leg over his knee.
“I’ll start at the beginning. I met Valerie at an event in Las Vegas. I got drunk, fucked her in the back of my limo, and two months later, she called me up—she got my number from a business colleague—and told me she was pregnant. I didn’t even remember having sex with her.”
“Because you were so drunk?”
“Because it was so insignificant.”
“Ouch.”
“You know the most surprising part? I was elated—but not about Valerie. I was elated that I was going to have a child.”
“I don’t think that’s particularly surprising.”
“No? Why?”
“You care. A lot. Astor, you have a lot of passion pent up inside you. I can see it in your eyes, feel it in your touch. Which is why you’re so miserable. You’re an extremely emotional person but refuse to acknowledge it. Do you know what you need?”
“You. Again. Right now.”
“No. You need a journal to write down your feelings—you know, instead of decapitating baby dolls.”
His lip quirks.
“No one has to read it, and if you don’t know where to start, write it like a letter, to no one in particular, and just get it all out.”
“I’d rather cut out my own spleen.”
“I don’t doubt that, but please, just think about it. Start writing, and I’ll bet you’ll find yourself opening up.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I grin, settling next to him on the loveseat. “Thanks for indulging me, at least.”
He winks.
“Back to the subject. Have you always wanted children?” I ask.
“Absolutely not. My job doesn’t allow for it. But when I heard that she was pregnant with my child ... I don’t know, it was like something lit up inside me. Hope that there could be something wonderful in this dark, black, dreadful world I live in, day to day. But that feeling was fleeting, almost instantly replaced by the most intense fear I’ve ever experienced. Me having a child would make me vulnerable to my enemies. The child would have a target on its back from the day it was born. So, I knew I had to keep the pregnancy a secret, and I didn’t know if I could trust Valerie to keep this secret, so I married her.”
“So that you could keep her close, under your watchful eye.”
“Right.”
“That feels drastic.”
“Does it? I impregnated her. I felt like it was my duty to protect her and our unborn child.”
“You have a very skewed sense of chivalry, do you know that?”
This earns me a half smile.
“Then what?”
“Well, I married her and moved her in with me, and I tried to make it work. Honestly, it wasn’t hard because every time I looked at her growing belly, I felt excitement and joy—two feelings that were very foreign to me. I tried to force a loving relationship between us. She tried too, I think. But it didn’t work.”
“I find that hard to believe. You can be very persuasive.”
He takes a deep breath. “Valerie had severe depression, and the pregnancy only made it worse. She became more and more unstable. She started resenting me for taking away her independence and demanding she take a bodyguard with her anytime she left the house. We fought all the time. The kind of arguments that make you want to pull your hair out, you know what I mean? Like two insolent children, neither trying to understand the other’s perspective, instead just screaming over each other. And that’s when I abandoned hope that we might have feelings for each other. Instead, I began building a wall of protection around her and Chloe, thereby making Valerie dependent on me for survival. It was manipulative, but I did it to protect my child.”
He looks at me, the guilt palpable. But as I listen, I can’t help but remember Prishna’s words ...
“He loves her. Her only. When Astor finally gets sick of toying with you, you will be forgotten the instant you leave his sight. He does not care about you, not in the way that you wish he would, and he will never care about anyone like he did his wife ... He cries out for her in his sleep, but you wouldn’t know that, and you never will. Because Astor never allows his whores to stay in his bed with him.”
“After Chloe died,” he says, “Valerie became even more unstable. She’d barge into my office unannounced, screaming obscenities while I was in the middle of meetings. She tried to kill herself multiple times. It got so bad that I asked her sister, Prishna, to come stay with us.” He clears his throat. “And this is where that story begins.”
I tuck my leg under my body and turn fully to him.
“Prishna has her own demons. She’d become estranged from her sister and family a long time ago and began running with a really rough crowd. She was on a downward spiral and was having some major health issues when Valerie and I married. At the time, she was more than happy to help with Valerie because she didn’t have much else going for her. So, I opened my house to her and gave her a fresh start at life, offered her a job.”
“You gave her a fake identity.”
“Correct. Prishna died and Asha was born.”
“Asha? Why doesn’t she go by her new identity?”
“She doesn’t need to here. Cillian and Leo know about it, and also Valerie hated calling her sister by a different name. So, we all just kept calling her Prishna.”
“Did Valerie not approve of what you did?”
“She was so self-absorbed by then, she didn’t care. Having Pri around helped anchor her for a while, but eventually, Valerie wanted out of the apartment—and New York—because she said it reminded her too much of Chloe. So, I packed us up and we came back here. But this place reminded her even more of Chloe, because we’d vacationed here a few times while she was a baby.”
“You guys moved into this lake house?”
“Yes.”
“So, that’s why there are so many pictures of her everywhere. This wasn’t a vacation home, it was an actual home.”
“Correct. And she put them up, to be clear.”
“She put up pictures of herself?”
“Yes. She became obsessed with the thought that I was cheating on her and might leave her.”
“Which you were.”
“Right.” He sighs. “So, she put little pieces of herself everywhere. It was one of the many strange things she did before she completely lost it.”
“What about the locks on the outside of the doors?”
“That’s another thing she did. I came home one day, and a handyman was here doing it. I asked her why, and she said because she wanted to lock up the voices.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we lived here together for months until our arguments started becoming physical.”
“Physical?”
“Yes. She came at me with a knife once; I pushed her. It wasn’t good. It became apparent that Valerie needed psychiatric intervention and away from me. So, I set her up with proper home care, security, an on-call medical team, and moved her to her favorite beach house that we own. And that’s where she lived for years.”
“Until Carlos took her.”
“Right.”
“He said she killed herself. Do you believe he’s innocent in her death?”
“I do. As much as I hate the guy, I don’t think he’s a killer. And she’d tried to commit suicide countless times, so ...”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need for you to be.”
“No, I mean ... I’m sorry, but I don’t fully believe you, and you should know that.”
Astor frowns. “What?”
“I think you did love your wife, deeply. Hell, she’s all around you, Astor. You keep her sister around you at all times, which is a little piece of her. Her pictures are everywhere—and you haven’t bothered to remove them. You light a candle for her every day. I saw you crying over the memorial you set up for her outside, next to your daughter’s. So, yeah, I think you still love her. I think you still might be in love with her. And I think her presence is still very much in this house.”