Page 155 of Diamond Devil

A memory I’ve tried so fucking hard to forget over the years suddenly floods my brain.

Mila’s tear-stained face. Blood flecked around her mouth. A fresh bruise blooming across her cheek.

“Please, Ilarion,” she sobbed. “Please…if you love me…if you love me…let me do it.”

I dropped to my knees in front of her, begging the only way I knew how. “It will eat you up from the inside out, Mila,” I pleaded with her. “It’s not an easy thing to look a man in the eye and pull the trigger.”

“I want to watch him die. I want to watch that poisoned soul leave his body.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I’ve had years—fuckingyears—to think about what to ask when the time came. I know what I want.”

“Let me do it for you,” I said. “Let me carry this—”—

“I’m stronger than you think,” she insisted. “Please, Ilarion. If you love me…let me do it.”

“Ilarion.”

I blink, and I’m staring at Taylor, not Mila. As different as the two situations are—“night and fucking day” doesn’t even begin to cover it—it doesn’t feel that different. It feels like I’m being asked to prove my love, all over again.

“What’s the plan, Taylor?” I ask.

She shuts her eyes. “She loves you. Benedict knows that she’s your fiancée. You need a wife. All three things suggest that marrying Cee is the right thing to do.”

“And where does that leave you?”

“When she’s recovered, I will tell her that…that I’m pregnant.”

My eyes harden as I understand where she’s going. I hate it now with a thousand times more white-hot intensity than I did the first time around, when I already fucking despised it. “You still want to pass off the baby as someone else’s?”

“It’s the only way,” she says again, as if repetition will make it tolerable. “You will have a niece or nephew, not a daughter or son. You’ll still get to see them grow—”

“But I won’t be able to claim them as mine.”

“No.”

“That baby in your belly is my heir.”

She shakes her head. “Make heirs with your wife, Ilarion. This baby has to be mine and mine alone.”

“You think it’s going to be easy? To watchmychild grow and act detached from it all?”

“You do pretty well already.”

She might as well have slapped me across the face. “What the hell does that mean?”

Taylor runs a hand through her hair, and for a moment, the gesture distracts me. I want so badly to touch her hair, to run my fingers through it. To just hold her and forget this whole conversation ever happened.

“I don’t mean it to be cruel.” She smiles at me sadly. “You’re just really good at not expressing your emotions. You’re practiced at hiding how you truly feel.” She lets out a crazed little laugh, but I don’t know what’s so funny. “You and Cee actually have that in common. It’s how we landed in this mess, isn’t it?”

Stop pointing things out. Stop making sense. Stop fuckingseeingme, goddammit!

“This city might just be too small for all three of us, Ilarion,” she adds softly. “After the baby’s born…after the…thewedding…” Her voice sticks on the final word. “After that, I’ll leave.”

My blood runs cold. A fleeting image of a future without Taylor in it flashes before me, and I want to vomit.

But, as she said, I’m very good at pretending. “Where to?”

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