A beat of uncomfortable silence follows. I can’t help but wonder, When did she start to respect me? I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but there’s no denying that that’s what the soft glow in her eyes is: respect.

  I’m beginning to doubt I’ll ever understand these people.

  “So…is there a reason you’ve decided to be your brother’s lackey? Not judging or anything. I’m just curious.”

  Mila scoffs. “Bullshit. You are judging. And I can’t exactly blame you. I’d be judging you if the roles were reversed.”

  “So why do it?”

  She sighs, and as she does, her posture folds in on itself. Like she’s trying to keep something embarrassing cupped in her arms so I can’t see it. “Honestly?”

  “If you can manage it.”

  She throws me a glare, but there’s humor behind it. “Because he’s my hero.” I raise my eyebrows and she chuckles. “I know—it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I say softly. “Not if you mean it.”

  “I didn’t have parents growing up,” she explains. “Not real ones. But I had Ilarion. And he was the best big brother anyone could ever hope to have. He would kill for me. Literally.”

  I shudder. “Yeah, that’s the part I have trouble with.”

  “It doesn’t take as long to get used to as you would think.”

  “That’s not what I want for my child,” I tell her. “Or for myself.”

  “Well, then you chose the wrong man to sleep with.”

  I run my hand through my hair, catching a few painful knots in the process. I really need to drag a brush through it at some point. It’s one thing to isolate myself up here; it’s another thing to let myself go entirely. Just because I feel like a caged animal doesn’t mean I have to look like one.

  “Does your brother love my sister?” I ask bluntly. I’m very aware that I sound like a broken record by this point. But no one has ever given me a straight answer.

  At least not one that’s believable.

  Mila’s expression doesn’t change, but I suspect that’s because she’s trying very hard not to give anything away. “What’s the answer you’re hoping to hear?”

  I bristle. “That’s not fair.” And not the direction I want this conversation to turn, either. This is about Ilarion and Celine, not about me.

  She winces and holds up her hands. “Sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, my default setting is ‘bitch.’”

  I can’t help but smile. As annoying as it was being at odds with her, turns out it’s equally annoying to find that I like her. I don’t want to like anything about Ilarion or his world or the people who’ve chosen to join him in it.

  “You love your brother, right?” I say. “Well, I feel the same way about my sister. And I happen to believe that his feelings for her aren’t pure.”

  “Nothing in life is pure, Taylor,” Mila says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her voice crack quite like that. A crack that reveals a glimpse of something beneath it. Pain. Heartbreak. Damage. “Even if you find something that comes close, it’s only a matter of time before it’s tainted.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. The most we can come to expect from life is to survive it. My brother proposed; your sister accepted. That’s all there is to it. We just need to get out of the way.”

  I just nod miserably. Some lines can’t be crossed. I’ve asked Mila to speak against her brother and I have to accept that she will never do it. “Okay, I get it. You have his back.”

  “No matter what,” she confirms.

  “And I’ve got my sister’s.” I sigh. “Which is why she can never know about this baby, Mila.” My hand trembles over my stomach. “You need to convince Ilarion that this is the only way forward. He can’t claim this baby as his.”

  Mila looks wary. “You’re asking for a lot, Taylor.”

  “I’m asking for what’s necessary. It’s the only way forward. Ilarion wants to marry Celine; well, she’s not going to marry him if she knows I’m carrying his baby.”

  Mila mumbles something and gets to her feet. I think she’s about to walk out on my request, but she turns to me with a sympathetic smile. “You’ve been cooped up in this room for long enough. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Outside. A walk in the gardens will do us both some good. Unless, of course, you’d rather stay in here and get even pastier than you already are.”

  I roll my eyes, but join her. “So I need a tan. Fine. But why will it do you good? Something going on?”

  “Oh, you’re a regular super sleuth, aren’t you?” She rolls her eyes. “There’s no particular reason, honestly. Not anymore. I just got into the habit of walking the grounds when I was younger. I guess it was an attempt to outrun my demons.”

  I frown. “Do you have a lot of those?”

  “I did,” she replies. “But my dad is dead now. So there’s one less than there used to be.”

  38

  TAYLOR

  It’s hard not to gawk. The gardens at the Diamond are an endless labyrinth of lush hedges and ancient trees. Around one corner is a water-lined grotto; around another is a grid of statues watching over the night.

  Mila catches me looking around slack-jawed. I hear her chuckle softly under her breath. “It’s a lot, I know. I forget that sometimes. It’s hard to remember that not everyone grows up with—”

  “Fairytale castles on every coast?”

  She laughs again. It’s funny how much her face changes when she smiles. Mostly, it makes me realize how little she does it. “Right. People think that that’s enough reason to be happy, but I haven’t met a single property that’s made me feel as good as a person can.”

  I glance at her sidelong. “Who’s your special person?”

  Mila rolls her eyes. “There is no special person. It was a general statement.”

  “Sure. And I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

  She gives me the finger as she pretends to scratch her nose. “Come on, wiseass,” she mutters, gesturing to a huge tree that looks out over the rest of the property from a perch at the top of a gentle hill. She sits down against its trunk and pats the grass at her side.

  “What’s your dad like?” she blurts once I settle in. “Are you close with him?”

  “More so when I was a kid,” I admit. “As Celine and I got older…things changed.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I used to think that Mom’s cancer pushed him over the edge. Made him paranoid and scared of his own shadow. But honestly, it started before she was diagnosed. He started seeing, like, capital-D danger everywhere. He stopped letting Cee and me have sleepovers; he used to insist on dropping and picking us up from school because he didn’t want us taking the bus. If he could’ve implanted tracking chips in our skulls, he wouldn’t have even hesitated.”

  “Sounds like a lot.”

  “To say the least. Things got worse after Mom was diagnosed. It’s like he thought the world was out to get him.”

  “But you still love him?”

  “Of course I do. He’s my dad. And as annoying as it is to have him hover over us all the time, Celine and I both know he does it because he loves us. He wants to keep us safe, like any other father.”

  Mila snorts. “Not all fathers are like yours, Taylor. Not all mothers, either.”

  I tilt my head to look at her in the gloom. She’s got Ilarion’s chiseled profile, though slightly blurred, feminized at the harshest edges. “You said your dad was your demon.”

  It’s not really a question, and I don’t really expect an answer. It’s more of a game. Me wondering which topic is going to be the one that shuts her down. Talking to these people is like walking on eggshells—if the eggs all had bombs inside.

  “I don’t think he was capable of being anything else. Not all Bratva pakhans are like Ilarion.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning Ilarion isn’t cruel without cause. He’s not sadistic or power-hungry. He meets violence with violence, but always within reason. And if you’re not violent, neither is he.”

  “Is there ever a reason to be violent?”

  Mila meets my gaze. “Only someone who was raised in a happy home with two loving and protective parents would say something like that.”

  It’s meant as a rebuke, and it has the intended effect. I clam up and look out over the spread of the garden below us. City lights twinkle in the distance. The warm night breeze tickles my nose.

  Next to me, Mila looses a weary sigh. “I really am sorry about your mother,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that other people love their parents. It’s sort of a foreign concept for me.”

  I guess, in a way, I can sympathize with that. I can certainly appreciate the thoughtful apology. “Thank you for helping me out with the funeral.”

  She shrugs. “I was ordered to.”

  I resist rolling my eyes. Way to ruin the moment. She takes after Ilarion in that department, too. “You act like you follow your brother’s orders, but I have a feeling you don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

  She smiles shyly. “Okay, I’ll give you that.”

  “You know I’m right, don’t you?” She’s in a good mood, so I’m going to risk it by veering into forbidden territory. “About convincing Ilarion to let me claim my baby belongs to some other random guy. Anyone but him.”

  She purses her lips in distaste. I admire her loyalty to him; it runs deep. But even though I respect it, I’m not above trying to whittle it down if it means I can spare Celine some pain.

  Because my loyalty runs deep, too.

  Her face swivels in my direction, and her eyes are thoughtful. “You’re really okay with letting your sister marry the father of your child?”

  “Things didn’t exactly happen in chronological order.” I try to muster a joke to lighten the weight in my chest, but it works only a little bit. “I mean, she loves him. At least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

  “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

  “My mother, my aunt,” I admit. “Celine told me, too, but not in so many words. In fact, she was pretty tight-lipped about Ilarion, right up until their engagement party.”

  “That seems unusual, especially for sisters who seem so close.”

  “We are close,” I assure her. “But it’s also…complicated.”

  “See what I mean?” Mila crows. “Nothing is pure.”

  I start playing with the rocks at my fingertips. The soil is packed tight around the base of the tree, but there’s still tiny little creepers growing out of the earth. Little shoots of life finding their way to the surface against the odds. “Celine’s one of those reserved people. She keeps her feelings close to the chest. I guess I just assumed if she felt strongly about something, she would tell us…or at least tell me.”

  “Ah.” Mila shares a knowing nod. “This is about a boy.”

  I wince. It sounds so trivial when she says it like that. In my heart, it feels like anything but. “I wish it were something better. Something more important.” I meet her eyes. “His name was Alec. He and his parents lived in the house across from ours when we first moved to Evanston. He was the only kid on the block who was in our age range. You kinda just gravitate toward each other when it’s like that.”

  The memories start to flood my mind. Memories I’ve kept buried since it all happened almost a decade ago.

  Even at thirteen, you could tell that Alec Miller was born to break hearts. Blond hair, blue eyes, the kind of smile that made smart girls do stupid things.

  Not that I noticed, of course. I was eleven. I mostly liked the fact that he was always up for a scooter race with me on the weekends.

  “You both fell for him,” Mila deduces.

  I nod sadly. “There was a point when I suspected that Cee might have a crush on Alec. But every time I asked her, she flatly denied it. She told me that they were friends and that’s all it was.”

  “And you believed her?”

  I sigh. “She and Alec spent a lot of time together. I’d come home from swim practice, and Celine would be over at the Millers’ house, hanging out with Alec in his room. They were the same age, they had more in common… It made sense. I felt left out sometimes, but I kinda expected that friendship to, you know…evolve.”

  “It didn’t?”

  I shake my head. “Celine turned fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. She brought her first boyfriend home and introduced him to Mom and Dad. Alec brought a girlfriend of his own home a few weeks later. I figured that was that.”

  I glance at Mila, wondering if this whole story is as foreign to her as her life feels to me.

  “Then, just before my sixteenth birthday, Alec broke up with his girlfriend. Cee had been single for a few months at that point, and one day, I caught her looking at him. I asked her again if there was something there, and again, she denied it.”

  “So you felt free to date Alec,” Mila surmises.

  “He kissed me on my sixteenth birthday. I didn’t expect it. I really, truly didn’t. I mean, he was two years older and when you’re in high school, that kind of age difference seems big. I figured he just saw me as Celine’s tomboy little sister. I guess not, though. Anyway, we kept it a secret for a while. We didn’t want our parents to know because we assumed they’d be weird about it. Turned out, Celine was the one who was weird about it.”

  “What did she do when she found out?”

  I shudder and close my eyes. I can still see her face like it’s seared on the backs of my eyelids. Tears. Red cheeks. Hair wild, and the way her voice trembled before it cracked entirely…

  “It was the first time I felt like Celine might never speak to me again.” I open my eyes and look at Mila, who hasn’t moved. “I broke up with him. He stopped talking to me, and eventually moved out of state for college.”

  “And Celine?”

  “Celine took some time, but she eventually started looking at me like I was her sister again,” I say. “But she never stopped treating me like I was plotting to steal everything she had.”

  Mila nods. “So that’s why she didn’t tell you about Ilarion.”

  “She’s never going to believe me if I tell her I met him before she did. Hell, I don’t even believe me, and I was there,” I groan, feeling my heart sink at the thought of seeing her cheeks go that red again. “I can’t hurt her like that. Not for a second time.”

  She breathes softly in the night. “What the fuck were you supposed to do?”

  I shake my head. “I was supposed to have my sister’s back. I should’ve—

  “No, Taylor. Stop paying the price for her mistakes. You’ve got your own life to account for.” Her gaze flickers down to my stomach.

  I snort. “Right. Trust me—my feelings won’t ever get in the way again.” Mila raises her eyebrows and I realize what I’ve just inadvertently revealed. “Not that—I don’t mean—I don’t have feelings for Ilarion.”

  Fuck. Why didn’t I just keep my big mouth shut? Nothing sounds guiltier than an admission of innocence.

  “Mila!”

  We jerk upright as Dima appears on the path. He waves, and Mila springs to her feet. “When did you get back?” she exclaims.

  He doesn’t return her enthusiasm. “A couple of minutes ago. We need you in the den.”

  My shoulders tense. “Don’t you worry,” Dima tells me when he sees me on edge. “We’ve got the situation under control.”

  Mila turns to me. “Why don’t you head back up to your room and rest, Taylor? I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I nod. “Okay.” I know when I’m being dismissed.

  She reaches out and her fingers touch my shoulder. “Thanks for sharing all that with me,” she says.

  “About that… Can we keep it between us?”

  Mila nods. “I’ll take it to my grave.”

  I watch her walk up the path until she and Dima melt into the mass of shadows at the mouth of the gardens.

  When I’m sure they can’t see me anymore, I follow.

  39

  ILARION

  “…do you mean, ‘it went wrong’?” Mila asks, walking her and Dima’s conversation into the den.

  I’m standing there with my back to the window, staring at the bloody piece of paper on my desk. I can’t bring myself to look away from it. Not even when Mila and Dima walk in and close the door.

  “I mean that the lead I was chasing is dead.”

  “So Benedict knew he was close to cracking.”

  I glance up just in time to see Dima shake his head. “It wasn’t Benedict who pulled the trigger,” he says, his gait filled with barely-contained adrenaline. “The guy did it on his own.”

  “Come again?”

  “Shot himself in the neck while I was standing a foot away,” Dima explains. “I really thought he was going to tell me everything. I was so sure he was ready to crack.”

  “Fuck,” Mila spits. She turns to me as though I’ll have all the answers. “So…what’s next?”

  I gesture wordlessly to the note on my desk.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “I found it on the body. In the pocket of his pants.” I take the note and hand it to my sister.

  She wrinkles her nose as she takes it and examines it carefully. Over her shoulder, Dima is frowning. “This is blood… Why does the writing look so familiar…?”

  “Wait.” Dima peers at the note. “Those are coordinates. It’s a location.”

  I nod. “Correct.”

  “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. “He actually coughed something up. Didn’t see that coming. I don’t get it, though. Why didn’t he just give me the note?”

  “I have a feeling he didn’t know about it,” I speculate. “Just a hunch, but something tells me that note was slipped into his pocket without his knowledge.”