Page 83 of Deadly Oath

“But you were too busy stalking and trapping me to do it. To turn the man in who actually tried to facilitate my sale. Who was—indirectly, I will still add—responsible for what happened to your sister. Instead, you came after me. I wasn’t responsible for any of it. I’m still not.” She looks at me evenly, never moving to wipe away the tears. Her chin is tilted up, her blue eyes angry. Angry, hurt, and filled with a depth of grief that tears at my heart to see.

But I don’t have any right to comfort her. Not now.

“With my own criminal connections, it can be—tricky, to work with the FBI. I moved quickly on our marriage before Caldwell could dig too deeply into me, once he found out I helped with the mafia that was stalking you in Kentucky. Once he found out who I really was, that would have been the end for my plan.”

“So my FBI agent is at fault. Good to know.” Sabrina’s voice is crisp, curt. It’s barely a voice that I recognize at all—hollow in a way that I’ve never heard her before.

“No. But—” I draw in a slow breath. “I haven’t been able to think of a way to get this information to the FBI in a way that won’t open me up to a line of questioning that could put me in danger. Local police can be paid off, but the FBI—” I chuckle darkly. “That’s another matter.”

“I’ll do it.”

It takes me a moment to reconcile what she’s said with the words coming out of her mouth. “You’ll—what?” I stare at her, sure that I’m interpreting her incorrectly.

“I’ll take it to the FBI. I’ll tell them the truth about what my father did.” She slides the small recorder back into the pouch, the tears on her cheeks drying in streaks on her skin. “I’m his daughter. I have no criminal record. They’ll believe me, and he’ll go to prison. Which is what he deserves, right? For what he did to me. For what he did to Ailin.”

Her gaze burns into me, and I wonder for a moment if she’s going to go further, to say that I deserve the same. That she’s going to turn me in as well. But she simply closes the file, and sits there, straight in her chair.

I frown. “What’s in this for you, Sabrina? Revenge, maybe, now that you know the truth. But what else? What do you want?”

“You let me go.” She says it evenly, without hesitation. “I turn my father in, and you let me leave. Me, and the baby.” She presses a hand to her stomach as she says it. “We part ways, and put this in the past.”

She pauses, still looking at me, her gaze never wavering. “You hurt me beyond anything I could have imagined. My father will go to prison. That’s revenge, right? The revenge you wanted for your sister—on me, on him. You’ll have it. And I’ll leave.”

It should be that simple. But something in me resists the idea of letting her go. Not for more revenge, not to continue to torment her—but for another reason, one that I’ve been pretending didn’t exist all this time.

I don’t want to be without her. And now that I’ve realized my mistake, the terrible thing I’ve done—I want a chance to make it right. To earn her forgiveness.

But she doesn’t owe me that.

“What about the baby?” I sit up straighter, looking down to where her hand is still pressed against her stomach. “That’s my heir, Sabrina.”

She tenses, and her expression turns hard. “If you think you’re going to take my child away from me, Kian—if youreallythink youwant to try to do that, this is going to be a very different conversation.”

Mychild. Notours. The difference hurts, more than I thought it would. I should tell her that she can’t leave, not with my heir. Not withourbaby. But I can’t truly take the baby away from her, not the way I’d planned to. Not now—not when I’ve realized how wrong I was this entire time.

And I can’t force her to stay, either.

“Alright,” I say quietly, turning my palms up in surrender, even as I feel a sharp, stabbing pain in my chest at the thought. “You turn your father in, and you can leave. I’ll agree to that.”

Sabrina nods once, sharply. She puts her hand out, across the desk, and I take it, shaking it once. A formal, businesslike gesture. But the touch sends a jolt through me, all the same.

This is the end of it, I think, looking at her from across the desk.My revenge. All of my plans. I got what I wanted in the end—and Sabrina is the instrument of her father’s destruction. There’s something poetic in that, isn’t there?

I should be happy.Happier, at least. Satisfied. But even as she stands up, turning away from me to go to the door, I know one thing with absolute certainty.

I don’t want to let her go.

34

KIAN

Idon’t sleep well that night. I don’t want to admit that it’s because Sabrina isn’t next to me, because, in the space of only a week, I’ve gotten used to the feeling of her in bed with me. Nor do I want to admit that it’s because my thoughts are filled with her—with what I’ve done to her, the mistakes I’ve made, and how thoroughly I let revenge consume me. Shame fills me every time I go through it, over and over, realizing how blindly I charged forward until I finally acted—and it struck me what I had actually done.

My sister would be ashamed of me.I know that, and I know I would deserve it. The thought of Sabrina leaving me tomorrow, of her walking away and never seeing her again, feels as if my heart is being sliced to ribbons every time. But I can’t see how this ends any other way.

I can’t force her to stay. I can’t keep hurting her. And I can’t imagine a world in which she forgives me.

In the morning, I’m exhausted and groggy. I shower and dress in a clean suit, grateful that my fight the night before didn’t leave much in the way of marks on me. When I walk downstairs, Sabrina is already waiting for me, wearing a striped sweater dress and a pair of tall boots, her hair down and curled, her arms wrapped around her chest.She isn’t looking in my direction, and for a moment, the sight of her takes my breath away.

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