Natalya
Adrien
Present
After the long flight, most of which we spent asleep, tangled together in one seat with her tucked against my chest, we finally regrouped as we stepped off the jet, only for Kas to casually toss me a universal handcuff key he’d apparently had in his pocket the entire time.
I knew it.
He’s always prepared. Always planning ten moves ahead. The nefarious bastard just couldn’t let me have an easy victory.
Now we’re sprawled across the two sofas in the center of a massive hotel presidential suite.
All four of us. Safe. Out of the country. Out of the reach of the law. The whole gang together. Finally.
The balcony doors stand open, the warm southern air drifting into the room, thick with the wet scent of the sea. Crickets hum somewhere outside, their quiet rhythm blending with the distant rush of sea waves not far from the hotel.
We’re enjoying the luxury of the place in the most greedy way possible, full from ordering the whole menu, all of us freshly showered and slightly tipsy.
Plates, leftovers, and half-empty glasses are scattered across the low table between the sofas like the aftermath of a small celebration.
For a while nobody says anything.
But eventually my mind drifts back to the one thing we’ve all been carefully avoiding. The thing we’ve left behind.
“You,” I say, tossing a grape across the table at Kas.
He’s lying flat on his back, one arm behind his head. Kiara stretched out the opposite way across the couch, her legs draped over his chest. She’s wrapped in a towel, another twisted around her hair into a tall turban.
“How did you do it?” I ask, looking at him. “How did you get me out?”
He freezes and his eyes flick to Natalya straightaway.
So mine follow.
She’s sitting beside me on the other couch, wrapped in a towel as well, her bare feet resting on the table dangerously close to the bottles of prosecco. Our fingers are intertwined and I lazily trace my thumb across her palm.
She doesn’t say anything at first.
“I didn’t,” Kas answers at last.
The words make me stop mid-motion while pouring another round into our glasses.
“What?”
He’s still looking at his sister.
I turn back to her just as she lifts her gaze to meet mine. There’s something in her expression—guilt.
“So who did?” I force out, my pulse suddenly climbing.
There’s only one person way more powerful than Kasien who would do this.
She doesn’t need to say anything. I might be an idiot, but I’m not stupid.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I mutter, already standing.
“Listen—” she says quickly, rising with me.
I turn back to Kas.
“How could you let this happen?”
“Adrien, listen to me,” Natalya insists.
“What did he want in return, hm?” I snap, my hands already itching to grab something. “Goodbye kiss?”
“Nothing,” she answers casually. “No kiss happened, I already told you.”
“No,” I grit out. “He always wants something.”
I look back at her brother. “How could you let that happen? I’d rather rot in prison than owe him anything, you know that!”
Natalya grabs my jaw, forcing my face back toward her. “You don’t owe him anything.”
“Yeah, right,” I scoff. “You owe him now. Fucking great, Natalya.”
I turn away and stride toward our side of the hotel suite and she follows.
“No, I don’t.”
“You just think that,” I mumble over the blood throbbing in my veins. “Some time will pass, and he’ll suddenly come out of nowhere, asking a favor.”
“Listen to me.”
She catches both my arms. Her hands are cold against my skin, steady enough that I stop long enough to actually hear her.
“He doesn’t want anything,” she says firmly.
“How can you be so sure of that?” I breathe out, disbelief burning in my chest. “He’s a manipulative snake, Nat. You asked me not to kill him. So I didn’t. I wouldn’t.” I pull away from her, taking a step back. “But not so you could run to him for help.”
“He doesn’t want anything,” she repeats again.
“You killed his father. You killed the whole cage of people his father put on him. The only reason he held Kiara is for you two to burn the whole web of eyes he was tangled into. That’s all he ever wanted.
He manipulated you both to help him with something he couldn’t do. You freed him. We’re all free now.”
The clenched muscles in me loosen when her words start making sense.
“I’m not really sure what he’ll do with all the power he has now that his father is dead but…” Her eyes trail around the room, then fix back on me. “But he definitely doesn’t want anything from us anymore. I believe him,” she states, too calmly for my liking.
“How?” I ask quietly. “How can you believe him?”
She tilts her head, her brows furrowing as if she’s about to say something that’s obvious.
“Because,” she starts, but doesn’t finish. She just shrugs uncomfortably.
“Because?” I press.
“Do you really want me to say it out loud?” she says, her neck getting red with anger.
“Let’s fucking hear it.”
“Because he…cares about me,” she says, spreading her hands and letting them fall down to her thighs.
“Cares about you?” My brows lift, because I know damn well that’s not what she was originally about to say.
“Not in a normal way, not in a way that would satisfy him,” she adds.
I freeze, my jaw tightening with fear.
“And you?”
“What?” she gulps.
“Do you care about him as well?” I put emphasis on the word.
She opens her mouth, but I jump in. “Do you love him?”
Here we go.
“I love you,” she answers, too quickly.
“That wasn’t my question.”
She stays quiet, folding her hands on her chest.
“Do you love him?” I ask again, a little louder.
“Love can take many forms,” she grits out, visibly proud with her answer.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that in my world—the one where your heart had stopped beating—I fell for the closest thing that felt like you.”
She exhales slowly.
“Like me?” I croak weakly.
I swallow the toxic bile rising in my throat.
“I couldn’t live without the sense of you, Adrien. I wanted to burn with you, to dissolve into nothing like you did. But whatever it is that he gave me, it somehow kept me alive.”
She gestures to her chest, as if trying to explain with her hands.
“He made the pain physical. And after some time, it all turned physical and brought me closer to the idea of you.”
She shakes her head as if she’s trying to understand her own mind desperately, and her voice grows quieter.
“I don’t know how to explain it. Reality became optional for me. The only thing I knew for certain was that the version of the world without you in it wasn’t survivable.”
Her eyes soften and she takes a step toward me, closing the distance.
“So I created a new one. And in that version of space and time,” she pauses, nervously swallowing. “In a way…I loved him, yes. He was the only thing I had left from the world that had you in it.”
I stay silent and her words are repeating in my head as I’m trying to accept them correctly.
“I loved you in every reality I created,” she says quietly, pressing her hand suddenly against my chest. “I just had to find your heartbeat in someone else while I was trapped in the wrong one.”
My eyes start burning.
She loved him. Not instead of me, but because of me.
I hate it. So much my organs twist at the thought.
And yet the darker part of me understands perfectly, because when she was taken from me, I also searched for her in everything else. I only fell for other ways to numb it. Ways that almost made me quit the search too soon.
I grab her and pull her in a tight hug so she doesn’t see the tears I can’t hold anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumble, shaking. “I’m so, so sorry, baby.”
I run my hands down her spine and hug her tighter, lifting her up a little so she doesn’t have to stand.
I want to make sure she’s comfortable from now on until the rest of her life. I want to make sure she doesn’t have to carry even an ounce of anything we all did to her. I want to make sure she doesn’t have to do anything anymore, and also make sure she can do anything she wants.
“I’m so sorry that you were scared to tell me,” I whisper into her hair.
“No, I wasn’t,” she shakes her head against my shoulder. “I knew you’d eventually understand.”
“I’m so sorry I put you through all this, Nat, I’m really so sorry words can’t describe it.”
My body starts quivering more, the regret getting out of me.
“Stop,” she whispers, her fingers dragging up and down my lower back. “We’re okay now.”
“Are we?” I ask quietly. “Did he really let you go?”
“Yes, he did,” she says firmly. “He realized whatever it was between me and him wasn’t right. It wasn’t enough.”
“And did you—” There’s something bigger than jealousy at this point. “Did you let him go too?”
“My soul belongs to you.” She nods in my arms. “It always has.”
We fall silent, my hands are pulling her closer to me even though there’s no space left to fill between us, as if I could press myself into her and push him away like that.
But I can’t do that.
After some time, the pressure loosens and the toxic feeling that felt far worse than jealousy or anything close to that, somehow dissolves.
After what feels like eternity, there’s nothing between us that would threaten another loss.
I think that finally, after years, we’re stripped of all the darkness, standing here completely exposed to ourselves and each other.
She pulls me out of the warm spiral of thoughts and I realize I’m smiling, because I feel like at this moment, she’s actually happy. Then she peeks up at me from under her lashes, and her smile is just another confirmation.
“Can we agree that from now on, you all stop giving me a hard time about him? I’m sick of it,” she says, lifting her brows and giving me that bratty attitude.
“Fine. Agreed.”
“Besides,” she adds, “I highly doubt you were a monk these past years, and I’m not giving you any shit about it.”
Fuck.
There’s still one thing.
Oh God.
The thing I keep forgetting about. But Kiara, however, insists that she needs to tell her, or it’s some girl-code breaking, since they’re officially best friends now.
“You’re weirdly quiet,” she adds and folds her hands on her chest. “Spill it.”