Chapter 2

I slid down the wall onto the floor and began sobbing into my palms.

“Why are you doing this to me? Please, I’m begging you, stop…” I cried. As I inhaled, I caught the metallic smell and realized that my tears were mixing with the blood from my nose in my hands. He knelt beside me, and I instinctively moved away. He grabbed my hands and pulled them away from my face. I expected another blow, or another forced sexual assault, but Luka only looked at me. And for the first time since we had seen each other again after childhood, I thought I saw some emotion in his eyes.

He tore off a piece of his white shirt, crumpled the fabric, and gently pressed it against my nose to stop the bleeding.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He said it so quietly that if I hadn’t held my breath and stopped sobbing at that exact moment, I wouldn’t have heard him.

I took the piece of fabric from his hand and moved away, as far from him as I could. I shook my head and closed my eyes.

“Please, just let me go. I’m begging you.”

His face hardened in an instant. I flinched at the sudden change and once again, as though the devil himself had taken possession of him, he pulled away from me and simply stared at me for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, he reached out, grabbed me by the upper arm, and pulled me toward him until we were face-to-face.

“Try to leave. You won’t even make it to the gate.” He said through clenched teeth before abruptly letting go and allowing me to fall backward onto the floor.

Six days ago

Olivia woke me before the alarm even had a chance to ring. She entered my room and pulled the thick curtains aside, letting the morning sunlight stream through the window. For a few seconds, I protested from underneath the duvet until I heard her opening the glass doors to the balcony. I peeked out and immediately sat upright in bed when I saw her carrying my breakfast tray and coffee out onto the balcony.

“Come on, sweetheart, you need to eat. On the balcony, just the way you like it. I’ve laid out your dress for the funeral.” She said as she walked out of the room. I stopped her just before she closed the door behind her and asked her to join me in the fresh air.

We sat down in the chairs, and I took the first sip of my coffee and closed my eyes. She gave me a disapproving look, and I knew exactly what she didn’t like - the fact that I drank coffee before eating. She didn’t say anything, though, only shook her head.

“My mother tells me Uncle Thomas was doing really badly?” I asked her.

She exhaled and furrowed her brows. “Mrs. Eleonor went to visit him every day for the last month. She said his kidneys suddenly failed. So sad…”

I nodded and changed the subject when I noticed her eyes filling with tears. Damn, I forgot how sensitive she was.. We talked a little longer about this and that, about my life in England, about the sad fact that I hadn’t intended to return to this life anytime soon, and about the gossip she had heard about the Devereauxs. After that, she left me to finish my breakfast and get ready for the funeral.

In the bathroom, I curled my hair into large waves and let a few strands fall loosely around my face. I put on a little makeup, just enough to hide the fact that I had slept for three hours, and then put on a black dress that fell to my knees and black sandals. I went downstairs to the living room and saw my mother and father waiting for me, ready to leave.

“Come on, the drive takes a few hours. We have to be at the estate by eleven,” my father said, and we went outside. Two black cars were waiting for us in front of the entrance to the house, and five men dressed in black suits stood in front of them, guns visible beneath their jackets. My father got into one of the cars with the security men, who drove ahead of our car, while my mother, the driver, and I followed behind.

During the four-hour drive, my mother took over Olivia’s role as an interrogator and continued questioning me about everything happening in London, about the things I was willing to talk about and the things I didn’t want to delve into. She told me how she had visited Uncle Thomas in the mornings, while Claire Devereaux went in the evenings, so they never ran into each other, though she knew this from the staff and from Uncle Thomas. Even during the final days of his life, he had done everything in his power to keep our families from turning against each other any more than we already had.

The funeral was not being held at Uncle Thomas’s estate, where he had lived, but at the family mausoleum on the grounds of the lake house, with its beautiful view of the mountain peaks and the vacation house that we had all called our second home. We hadn’t even arrived yet when something strange tightened in my chest. When I was little, I had been so happy to come here. We spent almost every weekend with Uncle Thomas, who brought us hot cocoa in the winter and cold lemonade in the summer, told us bedtime stories, and never got angry when we got into childish mischief.

After approximately four hours of driving, we approached the lake, and the house could be seen in the distance. The unpleasant feeling hadn’t gone away; if anything, it only grew worse when I managed to make out at least fifteen cars in the distance and, standing in front of them, four times as many people. As we got closer, my father parked first and told our driver over the phone not to get out of the car until he had made sure it was safe for us to leave.

Three minutes later, he approached our car and opened the doors for my mother and me. He took her by the arm and told me not to separate myself from them, or our security.

As we arrived at the estate, I realized there were far more people than I had initially thought. And from the moment we passed through security and reached the backyard, where the ceremony had been arranged and where the Crouse family’s private mausoleum chapel stood, I could see just how many people had gathered. The yard was enormous, filled with greenery, and in the center, white chairs had been arranged in rows on the left and right sides of the yard.

In front of the chairs stood the coffin. I caught sight of it, and my legs carried me toward it on their own. On the stone path leading to the coffin, several people stopped me to offer their condolences. I patiently stopped each time to greet them, even though I had no idea who half of them were.

When I finally managed to approach my uncle, grief of indescribable proportions swept through my entire being. He was dressed in the finest suit, surrounded by the wealthiest people in North America, buried in the most expensive coffin, and yet, he was leaving this world empty-handed. As if he had simply gone to bed and peacefully fallen asleep. I bent down to kiss his forehead, but at that moment, my gaze drifted toward the watch on his wrist. I saw something blue. Carefully, I pushed the sleeve of his suit upward and saw that his entire arm was covered in bruises. I furrowed my brows and didn’t even notice that someone had approached me from behind.

“They’re hematomas. He fell in the bathroom a few nights ago.”

I turned around and saw Claire Devereaux. It took me a few seconds to recognize her without the heavy makeup she wore whenever she was photographed for magazines. I looked around us, genuinely confused by the fact that she was speaking to me.

“Vivian, you’re not forbidden from talking to me. We’re family, after all.” She added when I failed to say anything.

I was saved from an extremely uncomfortable moment by the priest, who announced to everyone that the ceremony was about to begin. I gave her one more sidelong glance and went to take my seat. My mother, father, and I sat in the first row, along with a few of my uncle’s closest friends, while everyone else sat behind us. I mean the group of chairs on the left side. However, when I glanced toward the right, I saw Claire in the first row, her husband Victor, a young girl who didn’t look any older than thirteen, and the chair beside Victor was empty. The remaining seats behind them had been taken by other people.

“Who is the girl beside Claire?” I asked my mother.

“Her and Victor’s daughter. You haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s grown.” She whispered.

It was true; I had probably seen that child only once in my life, from a distance. She had never appeared in the newspapers, obviously kept away from the public eye. I knew she had been born not long after Victor’s first wife died.

I immediately knew who that empty chair had been reserved for; I just didn’t know where he was.

The priest conducted the ceremony and gave his speech, my mother and Claire each delivered a brief speech of a few minutes, followed by another one from one of my uncle’s business associates.

The coffin was carried into the mausoleum, and my uncle was laid to rest beside his brothers and their parents, as well as my aunt and uncle. The organizer announced that everyone should return to the yard, where food and drinks would be served in my uncle’s honor. Everyone went outside. I told my mother and father that I wanted to light a candle and that I would join them shortly. I waited until I was completely alone and realized that I didn’t have a candle at all. I knelt down and picked up one that had burned halfway down and fallen onto the floor, held it against another one that was still burning brightly, and placed it back in its spot.

I stood there, staring at his name engraved into the cold marble. I could only thank God that our families had managed to restrain themselves and that the funeral had passed without any major unpleasantness. Sure, there had been hostile looks exchanged between the two sides, as well as some distasteful whispering, but a major conflict had been successfully avoided.

That scenario didn’t last long, because soon a raised voice could be heard coming from the garden. Then another. Then a third. I ran to the chapel doors to see what was happening and found complete chaos. My father was standing face-to-face with Victor Devereaux, barely half a meter apart, while our security man stood between them—with a split lip and blood running down his chin.

“This was just a warning! Tell your men to stay away from our cars, or all they’ll find will be broken arms and bloody faces!” Victor shouted.

“My men were only looking after our security, just like yours.” My father replied, seemingly calm, although I could see his jaw slowly tightening and his hands dropping toward the inside of his jacket.

The guests began backing away, glasses of drinks being hastily abandoned on tables, women grabbing their children and pulling them toward the houses, while the men—the ones carrying weapons beneath their suits, and there were many of them—slowly took up positions as though they had spent years waiting for this exact moment. Someone shouted a name in Italian, someone else cursed in Spanish, and suddenly the entire courtyard had become a chessboard where no one knew who was an ally and who was an enemy.

Everyone who wasn’t part of the family or the business suddenly disappeared from the courtyard, and guns were in the air.

“No!” My mother exclaimed when she saw Victor draw his gun and aim it directly at my father’s head. I ran toward them, paying no attention to the guns pointed at my own head, and when I reached them, my father’s gun was also in the air, aimed directly at Victor’s chest.

“Put your weapons down!” one of my uncle’s men from the business shouted, his voice sounding as though he were trying to command two armies infected with every sin from Pandora’s box. No one listened. And just when I thought the next shot would be the one that wasn’t a warning, someone, despite the mass of people fleeing the estate, deliberately walked toward the battlefield.

“Enough.”

A voice rang out—quiet, deep, cold, so full of authority that half the people instinctively lowered their weapons, and even those who didn’t recognize the voice turned to see who was speaking. My lips trembled, and from the shock, I couldn’t even blink. Was that…? No, it couldn’t be. He looked like him, but… He was much taller, his shoulders broad, radiating a powerful aura of dominance. It couldn’t be Luka. But it was him. Those were the same blue eyes that could pierce straight through you with a single look. My God. It was my Luka. I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years. He should be twenty-eight now. I was captivated until he spoke again, dragging me back to reality and the gravity of the situation.

He approached our fathers, and he didn’t hurry as he walked—every step was calculated, slow, as though telling time that it should adjust to him, not the other way around. He stopped exactly between the two lines of raised guns without blinking, as if he didn’t care in the slightest that he could be the first one to die if someone pulled the trigger. I had a strange feeling that he was certain no one would. In a barely audible voice, he told them,

“Put your weapons down. Everyone. My godfather was just buried on this land. If anyone wants a war, start it somewhere else.”

Everyone obeyed and lowered their guns, even Luka’s father. Everyone except, of course, mine.

“Father…” I said as a warning, and at that moment, he lowered his gun too. But my world collapsed and froze, because that was the moment Luka’s eyes found me. I looked at him too, and for a second, I forgot to breathe.

I gave him a small smile. He had been the most beautiful thing in my childhood. My friend. The boy I trusted. The boy I had secretly been in love with and dreamed about marrying. The man I had mourned when he left America. Now he stood two meters away from me, looking directly into my eyes, and in them I saw nothing but pure hatred. Just like that, the smile was erased from my face.