Page 120 of Release Me

“Yes, but he was dead when I arrived. A drug overdose.”

But the look in his eyes tells me that if he wasn’t, there would have been two bullets missing from that gun. Two life sentences waiting to come crashing down on Sebastian’s head, upending his life, tarnishing his legacy, leaving me alone to raise our child and navigate the fractured remnants of his family.

It should bother me that the potential jail time is all that’s bothering me. Everything else— the gun, the body he dropped, the signet ring on the floor by my feet—ranks low on my list of concerns. I don’t care about any of it. I just care about him, about losing yet another good thing in my life because of Beau fucking Montgomery.

“I can’t lose you, Sebastian.” I push to my feet, biting my bottom lip as I start to pace the length of the office. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me, precious,” he says, standing as well.

“You don’t know that! You can’t know that! After they find his body, all it will take is one witness, one person to say they saw your car or your face at the scene of the crime, and then it’s all over.”

There’s no fear on his face. No concern. No regret. He folds his arms across his chest, and it’s then that I notice that his clothes are different. He must have changed before he came home.

“They won’t find a body because there’s no body to find,” Sebastian says, and the calm in his tone settles my nerves a bit.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that after I killed Beau, I had his body taken to a funeral home and cremated. He’s nothing more than ash now, precious.”

I pause, and the last of the anxiety making my muscles tight melts away. “So, he’s gone?”

Sebastian nods, and tears well in my eyes. “He’s gone, precious. He can’t hurt you anymore. And nothing is going to take me away from you or the baby. We’re going to have a long, beautiful life together, Nadia.”

A world without Beau in it.

It feels unreal.

I’ve spent so much of my life afraid of Beau, locked in the prison of fear he built around me. All this time I thought he was the only one who had a key, the only one with the power to free me, but as I look at Sebastian, at the sincerity in his eyes and soak up the certainty in his tone, I realize that was never true.

After the accident, I ran towards freedom, towards life even when I wasn’t sure I wanted to live, and then I collided with Sebastian and he did the rest. He saw the shroud of shame and the painful, hopeless cocoon I’d built around myself and used gentle hands and patient fingers to massage it open, to coax me out.

He watched with eager eyes as I took leaps of faith that taught me things I thought could never be true about me again. And when I took flight—eyes alight with fear and wonder because I forgot what it felt like to soar—he rejoiced along with me.

And when Beau came back, snatching me from the sky with violent hands to try and shove me back into that prison, Sebastian took a sledgehammer to every cinder block wall. He demolished the threat.

He set me free.

He released me, once and for all.

I go to him, crossing the room on shaky legs and wobbly knees that give out the moment I’m within his reach. He opens his arms, catching me by the waist and pull me into him, welcoming me into the solace of his embrace, into the salvation of his love, into a life full of peace and absent of fear.

44

SEBASTIAN

Four months later

“Sebastian, I can’t drink wine for another three months, so why do you insist on torturing me by making me pick out bottles for everyone else to enjoy at my baby shower?” Nadia asks from the center of the cellar I started building after her first visit to my parent’s house where she fell in love with theirs.

It was my intention to show it to her when I came clean about living in the unit down the hall from hers, but we never made it through the door. I would have been more upset about the delay if it didn’t work out so well. My initial plan was to bring her into the converted pantry space and tell her all about how I tracked down the bottles left in circulation from Thornehill Vineyards, so we could start our joint wine collection with her parents’ legacy at the forefront.

Having to wait weeks to get her back to New Haven and back to my place, meant I didn’t have to tell her about my plan, I got to show her it in action. I got to watch happy tears swell in her eyes and reap the benefits of her gratitude right then and there.

We haven’t spent much time in the cellar since then, but tonight, while our home—which is finally the beautiful meshing of our two units—is being over run with our family and friends, I’m eager to have her in here.

Not because I need her help selecting a wine for everyone to drink.

But because here, in our home, among the only tangible representation of Corrine and Maxwell Hawthorne’s life and legacy, aside from their beautiful daughter, is the one place that felt right to me when I pictured getting down on one knee and asking Nadia to be my wife.

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