Page 119 of Gemini Queen
As I absorb what Neo’s just said, I can literally feel my face go pale.
“Allmy stuff?” I ask carefully.
“Yep,” Neo says cheerfully. “I even managed to get your lease broken and your security deposit refunded from your rental house in Sharm.”
He looks like he’s expecting this to please me, but I feel sick to my stomach. Like all those pancakes I just scarfed down are in serious danger of making a violent reappearance. With one thoughtful gesture, Neo Mercury’s just upset the whole apple cart and wiped out what little remained of my carefully arranged independent life.
Now, even if I do manage to get off this island, I’ll have the clothes on my back and what little’s in my vastly depleted bank account (which the Fabergé egg from that Singapore job was supposed to replenish) and that’s it. My dive gear, my spare burgling kit, my books, clothes, all of it will be sitting here at Icarus.
Despite the complete disaster unfolding right in front of me, I realize Neo thought he was helping.
But he’s just done it again, hasn’t he?
“Babe?” Neo’s eyebrows scrunch together over his anxious eyes. “Why do you feel like that? What have I just done?”
Right. He’s reading me through our mate bond. The mate bond I stated repeatedly that I don’t want, but which I seem to have acquired anyway. Now I focus on constructing that mental wall between us to keep him out. Which of course he senses.
His green eyes turn cloudy with hurt, and my chest clenches tight with guilt.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
“Listen, baby,” I say carefully, not really wanting to have this conversation with my whole cohort listening in and Lucius huddled muttering over the phone next door. “I know you want to help, I do, and it’s sweet of you. But I really wish you’d checked with me first.”
“But that would have spoiled the surprise.” He’s watching me just as carefully, since I won’t let him in my head. “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you want your own stuff here with you?”
Vasili sighs and folds his napkin. I try to warn him off with my eyes, but he’s unstoppable. “Because she isn’t planning tostay, Einstein. She’s planning to abdicate and leave. Incidentally, that’s what your precious fated mate was off doing half the night. Since clearly you’ve been of no assistance whatsoever to her in this particular matter, your beloved was off with horrible me, plotting her death-defying escape.”
I’m absolutely horrified and somehow shocked by this betrayal, though I honestly don’t know why I ever trusted this terrible man to keep my secret in the first place. Of course, every word he’s saying is one hundred percent true. But this is one secret I wasn’t planning to spill.
Not like this. Not in a way that will hurt Neo.
Although really, there’s no way I could have told Neo that wouldn’t have hurt him. No way I could have told him I trusted Neo’s enemy with something I couldn’t entrust to Neo.
And now, given my own ambivalence, especially after this latest talk with Lucius, I’m no longer even one hundred percent convinced I’m leaving.
But that’s a deeper secret I definitely need to keep buried, because if Vasili knows I’m thinking about staying, I’ll have himandthe queen killer to worry about.
Assuming they’re not one and the same.
“I don’t believe your lies,” Neo says firmly to Vasili.
But I can feel my mate’s uncertainty like a knife in my heart.
“Oh, honestly,” Vasili huffs, “this revelation should hardly come as a shock. Our little queen hasn’t exactly been reticent about her perspective on having been abducted and transported here in the first place. And if you don’t believe me—a skepticism for which, admittedly, I can scarcely blame you—why don’t you askher?”
Neo’s trusting face turns toward me. The pancakes in my tummy congeal to lead.
“Zara would never lie to me,” Neo says stoutly. “Would you, babe?”
Under normal circumstances, I’m a good liar. It’s a job requirement for a thief and a fugitive like me. Here, now, assailed by guilt and a sudden sense of shame, I find I can’t even speak.
With unsteady fingers, I lift my cup to avoid meeting my mate’s trusting gaze and take a careful sip of my rapidly cooling coffee.
Which is the closest I can come to admitting it’s true.
Neo piles his silverware on his half-eaten breakfast and pushes his plate away. His big hands look unsteady too, but I’m too afraid to lower the wall between us to confirm what he’s actually feeling.
“When were you going to tell me?” he asks softly. “Or were you just going to leave me a note and disappear?”
