Page 6 of Revelation (Love Isn't What It Seems 3)

Five heartbeats, four silent breaths, and three steps.

That was when I saw him. Harry’s head dropped forward, half decapitated. Blood dripped from his neck, his lips, his ears. His face was unrecognizable.

Bile and rage mixed within me. He was dead. We were too late. For a moment, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I clenched my teeth against the emotions whirling within me. I wanted revenge, to make someone pay.

Suddenly, the sounds of bullets and machine guns echoed right outside the room.

“Ambush, ambush,” my men screamed outside.

“We have to move,” Daniel's voice barely penetrated through rage in my head. The shouting of English and Arabic voices could be heard outside, but it seemed miles away. Yet, it was ten feet from us.

“We are not leaving him,” I gritted out. He deserved a decent burial.

“Maxim, we don’t have time,” he reasoned with me. I knew he was right. We wouldn't make it out of this alive unless we left right now. We had to save ourselves but every fiber of me screamed it was wrong to leave our friend here. It was his human right to get a decent burial at least.

A blast echoed right outside, my ears rang with the intensity and my eyes burned from the smoke. I smelled the coppery scent of blood all around me, felt the warm stickiness of it on my skin.

There was no fighting left. We were dead!

I woke up with a jolt, sweat burrowed into my eyebrows, my breathing labored. Blinking several times, I waited for my vision to clear and my pulse to slow down. My heart pounded against my rib cage making each breath painful. Checking my limbs, my eyes roamed my body to find them all there while my skin glistened with sweat.

Staring out the large window, London glimmered in the night and the Thames River shimmered under the full moon, yet I didn’t see any of it. Instead, all I saw was the bright desert sun, felt the desert heat, and smelled the blood of my friends.

Life was too goddamn short.

We all fought our own battles, our own demons. No one was better at it than my family, starting with our father. Yet that didn’t eat at me as it did Alexander, my brother. My brother’s demons were different from mine. His demons fought any possible threat to our family legacy. He thought Liberty, his secretary, might have been one of those. If he still thought so, he did a pretty good job hiding it behind his hungry stare and constant barking at her. He fucking liked her… a lot. And I wished he’d finally get a move on and do something about it.

The bottom line was that our life could end tomorrow. He had lived in the past enough, correcting all our father’s mistakes. It was probably why I ended up joining the military. I loved my brother but his ideas of business and our future were completely different from mine. He needed to make Caldwell's name invincible and our fortune incomparable. At any cost.

If you asked me, none of it mattered if we were feared or hated. The military was my escape, but it didn’t pan out exactly the way me and my best friend, Daniel, envisioned. I was first to admit, I got more than I bargained for. We came back home with our own scars that were hidden from the world.

The guilt at surviving while many of my friends didn't was strong, even after all this time.

Chapter Three

Layla

Ipaid my blackmailer. I wasfreefor another year. I scoffed at myself. This was what life had become for me. Worrying about paying my blackmailer. I hated that looming over me, every year, every month, every day, and every second.

Even during my years in the States, attending university, the worry about settling the debt and ensuring I was home during that week in the summer was always heavy on my mind. In fact, the entire summer months were planned around that week.

Staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, I felt empty and lonely. There was a man laying next to me, yet I had never felt more alone. Like there was a gaping hole in my chest and it was getting bigger by the day.

I went out to the bar last night. It was stupid, I knew, but here I was. I felt lonely and lost. After receiving a few text messages from some high school girls that got hitched, it became so glaringly obvious that I’d never reach that stage. They were carefree, happy, in love… and all I felt was hollowness swallowing me whole.

Each day that went by, I became more what my grandparents always said I’d be. A useless leech of a person, just as my mother was. And searching for affection and love in all the wrong places.

Lachlan!

I recalled the last time I saw him, at his penthouse in Edinburgh. He looked like shit, going crazy over his wife. I wasn’t sure what happened, but if I had to venture a guess, it would be that Eve Bailey’s ghosts came haunting.

“What are you doing here, Layla?” He wasn’t pleased to see me. Not that I blamed him. After the fuck up I made at his party and tried to wedge a divide between Eve and him. I acted like a crazy, psycho ex-girlfriend when in fact Lachlan and I hadn’t been an item in a long time.

“I was in the neighborhood.”

It wasn’t exactly true. I felt lost and my heart bled with the loss of my best friend and her husband. He was the only person in this city who I knew would even listen to me. Despite it all, Lachlan was a good guy and tolerated me, even when I didn’t deserve it. Each breath I took hurt my lungs and made me choke on the lump in my throat. “Lena and Larry were in a fatal accident and I-”

“What?” The shock on his face was evident.

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