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When the quiet lasts too long, she takes a deep breath. It’s more disappointed than anything. “So you’re a criminal. Why would Adrian be mixed up with someone like you?”
“There was a lot you didn’t know about him.”
“God, I’m so sick of you telling me that. I’m—” She lurches up to her feet to give me a piece of her mind, but as she does, she wobbles unsteadily. She has to plant a hand on the desk to stop from tumbling over.
I take a step toward her. “You need to eat. You’re weak.”
“Don’t pretend like you care about how I am,” she snaps, eyes fluttering closed.
“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have brought you here. I wouldn’t have taken you under my protection.”
“‘Protection’? We just established that your ‘protection’ is a little unorthodox, to say the least.” She laughs, her eyes flashing with the kind of bitter vigor that her body is lacking. “I need protectionagainstyou, not from you.”
“What you need is to worry about your baby.”
“Don’t pretend you care about my baby, either,” she hisses. “You’ve got me locked up like a fucking fairytale princess. What happens when I need to see a doctor, huh?”
“You will have an obstetrician. The only difference is that she will come to you.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t keep me here forever.”
“I’ll keep you here for as long as I deem it necessary.” June recoils, taken aback by the edge in my voice. I sigh and relent. “The man that I killed… He was informing on me. If he had told my enemies about you, about the baby, then both your lives might have been threatened. They still might be.”
I tell her all this in the hopes that she understands the gravity of the situation. Adrian left her exposed, vulnerable. Worse, he left her uninformed. He always did have a habit of palming off his dirty work on everyone else.
On me, most of all.
June blinks and furrows her brows. “Okay…? What does any of that have to do with me? I don’t have enemies. You do.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
She drinks that in, still frowning. “Ravil,” she murmurs.
I’m mildly impressed. The dinner was no doubt overwhelming for someone unused to wanton violence like that. As dazed as she seemed, she noticed the part that mattered.
“Yes,” I echo. “Ravil.”
She scrapes at her cuticles, that nervous habit flaring up again. “You know what I don’t understand? You keep saying that Adrian was your enemy. So why would you then take in his pregnant girlfriend and offer her your protection? Why would you even care?”
“I never said Adrian was my enemy. I said I was his.”
“That doesn’t make any—”
“Maybe I’ll tell you more one day,” I interrupt. “If you agree to stop being stubborn and eat.”
She glances at the untouched food tray on the mahogany desk and eyes the avocado toast with regret before wrenching her gaze back to mine. Little by little, I’m getting through to her. She knows it, and she doesn’t like it at all.
Right on cue, her stomach growls violently. Her cheeks go bright red.
“Sit,” I command her. “Eat.”
Defiance flashes across her eyes again. It makes me want to grab her, shove her into that seat, and force some food into her mouth.
But before I’m compelled to resort to that, her shoulders slump and she falls onto the seat. Dispensing with fork and knife, she tears off a hunk of the avocado toast and devours it. I stand silently and watch as she does it again and again until there’s nothing left. Her relief afterward is palpable.
“Adrian would never have gotten involved with someone like you,” she says abruptly, wiping crumbs from her lips.
I look down on her with pity. “After all this, you really think you knew Adrian at all?”
