Page 64 of Burned

I don’t want this.

Isobel notices the faint shift in my posture.

“At least, that’s how Carlos saw it,” she quickly adds. She smooths a hand over her silk-covered thigh, ironing out wrinkles that aren’t there. “I didn’t, of course.”

Lucian’s face pales. My stomach ties in knots.

She looks right at me then. “I loved Lucian. I still do.”

And the room starts to go dark, circles closing in around my vision. A loud roar fills my eardrums even though no one makes a sound.

And I see my future floating away like smoke.

“Excuse me.” I stand on shaky knees, running from the room.

CHAPTER NINE

LUCIAN

I step outside the library,closing the door behind me. I can barely process what happened between the woman I love and me. I can’t process what just happened.

Why was I so quick to offer her protection? I tell myself it’s pride. She betrayed Carlos by coming here. He’ll be out for her blood. If he gets to her, he wins.

After the fire, everything between us was clouded with smoke.

I loved Lucian. I still do.

I won’t give those words power. Not now. Not with Erin in my arms.

Where is my beautiful girl? I stare down the hallway, empty of her.

I give her twenty minutes.

It is the most restraint I’ve shown all morning.

Possibly all year.

Twenty minutes of standing with my back against the library door, hearing murmurs of what’s most likely to be Rafe talking logistics, Blaze mutters creative threats involving Carlos’s organs, Gregory points out uncomfortable truths.

I hear very little of it.

I don’t hear her voice at all. I assume someone’s taken her through the other side of the library to the back stairway. I’ve put her as far from Erin as I can get her under the same roof. There’s a second wing with a small guest room we cleared and bugged. Not that she’s got a way of contacting him.

My head is clouded with questions.

She said she didn’t know all of it, that Carlos was going to kill me. Kill our men.

What did he tell her? Whatever lies he spewed, they were enough for her to leave me and possibly let him murder everyone who protected her.

The hallway is quiet. Too warm after the cold outside and the colder ghosts in the library. I search for her. I pass the staircase, the closed guest room door where Isobel is being watched, the other rooms.

I find Erin on the enclosed porch.

She sits curled in the corner of a faded floral sofa, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them. Beyond the glass, the woods stretch still and white. The sky is a hard winter gray.

She does not turn when I enter. “I told you, I’m peeing.”

I close the door behind me. “Hopefully not in that chair.”