Page 82 of Condemned By Betrayal
He will always choose you over any city or kingdom.My subconscious speaks with a confidence I can’t even muster for myself.
I ignore it and focus on the blurry buildings we’re passing. I latch onto the words on passing banners to keep myself anchored in reality, to stop myself from slipping back into my head, where my own thoughts keep betraying me for him.
The car pulls up in front of my family’s private hospital.
Lyn and I don’t step out until our bodyguards open the doors, after making sure everything is secure. It’s eleven in the morning, the peak of rush hour, but we walk cocooned by bodyguards. With these wall of men around us, I can’t even see people’s faces properly.
Without pause, we reach the private emergency elevator and step in with two of our guards. The elevator takes us to the sixth floor. Through its glass doors, I can see how empty the floor is, my brother’s men are scattered here and there, but that’s it. The dim corridor lights and heavy silence make it feel like we’re onthe morgue floor. A shiver trails down my spine at the thought. The farther we walk down the corridor, the more I look around, the stronger the feeling grows.
I turn to the bodyguard on my left. “Is this the morgue floor?”
“Yes, miss,” he replies, and I freeze mid-step.
“He’s alive. Don’t worry,” Lyn says, taking my hand.
“I know he’s alive. What I don’t know is why they’re keeping him among the dead.”
She sighs. “Must be Matleon’s sick idea of a joke.”
She’s right, no one else would think of something like this.
The bodyguards stop in front of a white door.
“Is he in there?” I ask one of them.
He nods.
“I’d like to speak with him alone.”
He hesitates, his eyes flick to the other bodyguard, but then he nods.
He opens the door, and I step into a room colder than the already cold hallway. Hunter’s definition of room temperature is four degrees lower than everyone else’s, just like Salvario’s, after spending nearly two decades in Greenland. I suddenly realize I haven’t noticed whether Salvario still has this habit.
The thought doesn’t linger for long, however, nor does any other thought, as my eyes meet the pair of gray eyes watching me without blinking. Even the cold of the room can’t stop my palms from sweating.
I stay rooted, my back pressed to the door, drinking in the sight of him. He’s sitting on the bed. There’s no sign on his face that he’s injured, if you can ignore the overgrowth of his beard. His expression is unreadable, as still as stone.
I take a few steps toward him. Before I can reach him, his cold, hard voice stops me. “I’m not prepared today, but I will be next time.”
I frown, but before I can ask what he means, he continues. “So don’t come here again, because next time, I won’t let you leave.”
I want to point out that he was the one being a saint just a week ago, telling me to go to the man I love, but I don’t get the chance as he delivers his next words in an even colder voice. “Now tell me, did that motherfucker touch what’s mine?” The suppressed rage in his voice makes each word vibrate with an intensity that reaches every molecule in my body. I’m left trembling.
Still, I make my way toward him. It’s an involuntary response from my body, it’s drawn to him; the warmth inside me growing stronger the closer I get. Only now do I realize I’ve been feeling that cold again, the same cold that had made its home inside me before he came into my life and drove it away.
“How are you?” I ask, keeping my voice steady.
“Did you let him touch you?” He answers with the question, because apparently this is the only thing that matters to him.
I purse my lips. “What would you do if I said yes?”
The rage surfaces in his visage, dredged from the deepest part of his darkness by this primal bloodlust.
“You shouldn’t have let that happen.” He takes his time with each word. “Now wait a few days, and then I’ll fuck you over the tiny pieces of him you’ll help me make.”
I clench my fists. Nausea and fury churn together in my gut. He’s already ruined me to the point where I can’t even get close to Salvario, and now he has the audacity to threaten me like this.
“Don’t you think you’re talking too much for a man who’s lost his freedom? What do you think my family will do while you’re carrying out whatever you’re fantasizing about in that brilliant mind of yours? Let me remind you, I’m not some helpless girl with no one behind her. I’m the daughter of the king of the underworld.”
