Page 76 of Captured Solace

I took a sip of the sweet herbal tea and released a sigh. “Viktor was trying to start a war and force my cousin to get involved. I…I found out and I was angry. I was drunk, I should have thought it through, but I didn’t.”

My chest felt heavy, like I was drowning. I cleared my throat and took another miserable sip of my tea. Magnolia waited patiently, her face impassive.

“I told Lucien, my cousin,” I admitted. “It was horrible, they were shouting and threatening each other. Viktor went up to the bedroom and got a gun and he had this look on his face I’ve never seen before. Like he was willing to do whatever he had to and it scared me.”

Magnolia chewed on her lower lip, her brows drawn together.

“You know how men fight?” I asked.

She hesitated and then nodded.

“It was like that. They were all so angry and I didn’t know if they were going to just shout or punch each other or someone was going to pull a gun. And I was standing there with my cousin’s wives thinking, this is my fault. If someone gets hurt, this is on me. I did this.” My throat caught and I blinked rapidly.

“Did they hurt each other?”

“No, my other cousin, Duran, must have somehow deescalated things,” I said. “He’s good at that. Then Viktor and I left and he barely spoke to me until the next morning.”

“Was he angry?”

“No, I wish he had been,” I said miserably. “I wish he’d screamed at me or just left me at my cousin’s house, but he just woke up the next morning and we had sex, but he wouldn’t look at me. I don’t know why he wanted to fuck me. Maybe he was just trying to torture me and make me feel worse.”

“Maybe he genuinely wanted to have sex with you,” Magnolia said. “Or maybe he didn’t know it was you who told Lucien at that point?”

“He knew, he knew all along,” I said. “But he didn’t say so until after we’d had sex and I made him breakfast. And then we fought…like really fought. Yelling, angry sex, and then he said he was leaving me because I’d betrayed him and he couldn’t trust me anymore.”

“Oh,” said Magnolia slowly. “I see.”

Tears overflowed and I wiped them away with my sleeve. “I understand though, I really fucked up. I shouldn’t have just told Lucien, but…Viktor shouldn’t have gone behind Lucien’s back with something like that.”

There was a long silence broken only by my quiet sniffles.

“Is he divorcing you?” Magnolia asked gently.

I shook my head. “He can’t unless he wants the alliance between Lucien and him to fall apart.”

“Alright, so granted I don’t really understand this whole…world you’re involved in that well. But honestly, you both fucked up, it wasn’t just you. He was doing something shitty and you had a shitty response to it. Would that be accurate?”

I nodded. “I just feel like an idiot because I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did.”

“He shouldn’t have been starting a war either,” Magnolia said. “You both fucked up and you both need to apologize to each other.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said, hiccuping “He wants to separate and he left. He just walked out like whatever it was that we had…didn’t mean anything.”

Magnolia looked out the window, her eyes focusing on something far away. There was a long silence and then she sighed and when she turned back to me, her lashes were wet.

“Do you love him?” she asked, her voice husky.

My fingers tightened around my cup and my heart beat faster as his face burst into my mind. Those expressive eyes that cut right to the deepest part of me and that mouth that sent heat through me every time it broke into a wolfish smirk. Without realizing it, my mind had stored away a thousand images of him and they all came flooding back to me now.

I remembered the way his skin tasted when it was wet with sweat. And the sensation of his hot mouth brushing over my skin and raising the hair on the back of my neck. The way he tensed his jaw as he pushed himself into me and how his mouth parted in a quiet groan as he came inside my body. The heat of his hand as it slid down my naked back, cupping my ass absently as I bent over the sink to do my makeup.

He had marked himself all over me, all over my life. His things were still in the bathroom, his razor hanging in the shower and his shampoo still in the bath. I’d worn nothing but his clothes for the last month, clinging to the last remnants of his scent. Burying my face in his pillow at night as I pressed the vibrator between my legs and wished that it was him.

But more than all these things, I missed the small pleasures of living with him. The touch of his body as he moved past me in the kitchen. The sight of him cooking in the kitchen, so handsome in just his sweatpants. The way he draped himself over my body at night, crushing me into the mattress with his warm weight. The sound of his voice tinged with that accent, the creases around his eyes, the curl of his smile.

I bit my lip to keep it from trembling and shrugged.

“You know the answer,” said Magnolia gently.

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