His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 4

ELENA

The porch tilted beneath my feet, and I grabbed the railing before my knees could decide otherwise.

Something is wrong.

The thought arrived with a clarity that the rest of my body wasn't matching. My vision had gone soft around the edges, the trees blurring into a single dark mass, the lake's surface rippling even though there was no wind. My mouth tasted metallic.

The wine?

I turned toward the drive where Liam had gone.

"Liam." My voice came out quieter than I intended, flattened by the thick air. "Liam, something — I think I need—"

I stopped.

A sound. Not from the drive.

From the trees to the left of the porch, where the darkness between the trunks was absolute.

I went still.

Nothing moved.

But the silence had changed quality. It was no longer the silence of an empty place. It was the silence of something waiting.

I took a step toward the front door. My fingers fumbled at the handle. Locked.

Liam has the key. Liam is at the car. Liam—

The first man stepped out of the tree line so casually it was almost worse than if he'd rushed.

He was large. Unhurried. He looked at me the way someone looks at a problem they've already solved.

A second figure appeared at the edge of the porch steps.

My mind went very quiet. Not peaceful — quiet the way a room goes quiet right before something breaks in it.

I gripped the railing.

Think. Think.

My legs were wrong. The drug had settled into them like cement, heavy and uncooperative, and the rational part of my brain was already running calculations: I couldn't outrun them.

The first man climbed the porch steps.

I looked down at my hand on the railing — and beside it, a potted plant, a narrow decorative spike holding a garden marker in the soil. Metal. Thin. Maybe six inches long.

I pulled it free.

The man reached the top step.

I dragged the spike across my palm.

The pain was immediate and sharp and real— a bright hot line slicing through the fog, snapping me back into my own body with a violence that made me gasp. My vision contracted. Sharpened.

There you are.

I pressed the cut against my thigh, letting the sting pulse, and I looked at the man on the top step and I said, very clearly, "Don't."

He kept walking.

I ran.

I launched myself off the far end of the porch and hit the gravel on both feet and kept moving, the stones biting through the thin soles of my heels, the silk of my gown catching at my legs. Behind me I heard the porch creak, heard the quick heavy footfall of someone not expecting her to move that fast.

I kicked off my heels without stopping.

The gravel was sharp and cold against my bare feet and I didn't care. I ran down the drive and past the car — Liam wasn't there!

Oh my God!

I hit the road and turned.

The drug came in waves. Every thirty seconds or so it surged upward and the trees swam and my legs went soft, and every time I pressed my cut palm against my thigh and used the pain to climb back out. It was a brutal, ugly, efficient method and I did it again and again.

I didn't know how far I ran. But the lakehouse lights vanished behind the tree line and the gravel became asphalt and the road widened slightly, a two-lane country road going somewhere unnamed in the dark.

My feet were bleeding. I could feel it, the slick warmth of it on the asphalt.

My hand was bleeding too, the cut deeper than I'd intended, throbbing now with a steady beat that I held onto like a lifeline.

I stopped because my legs made the decision without consulting me — one moment I was moving and the next I was standing at the road's edge with both hands on my knees, pulling air into my lungs in long, ragged pulls, my whole body shaking with the effort of staying upright.

The world tipped.

I straightened. Pressed the cut. Breathed.

I looked down the road in both directions. Nothing. Just the dark and the trees and the sound of my own breathing.

Then, in the distance — light.

Two pale beams, cutting through the curve in the road, moving toward me.

I stepped into the road.

Whatever was left of my composure, whatever careful, assembled version of Elena Voss usually moved through the world — I let it go. I raised both arms above my head, my cut palm open and bleeding, my hair loose and wild from the running.

I stood in the middle of the road and I waved.

The car slowed then stopped.

The headlights found me fully now, and I knew what I looked like in them — barefoot, bleeding, barely coherent, a woman in a ruined champagne gown standing alone on a dark country road at midnight. I knew what that picture suggested to someone who didn't know the story behind it. I didn't care.

The driver's door opened.

A man stepped out. Tall. Broad. He stood at the edge of the headlights' reach and looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read — guarded, sharp, taking in every detail with the rapid precision of someone accustomed to assessing situations quickly.

His voice, when he spoke, was low and controlled.

"What happened to you?"

I opened my mouth.

What came out was not the clear, articulate explanation I intended. It was something broken and breathless, barely words at all. My knees were shaking visibly now. The drug chose that moment to crest again, tilting the road sideways, and I took one stumbling step forward before my body simply declined to continue.

I caught myself on the hood of his car.

Both hands flat on the warm metal. Head down. Breathing.

"Hey." His footsteps crossed the asphalt quickly. "Hey — look at me."

I looked up.

His face was close. Hard angles, dark eyes, a jaw set with the tension of a man trying to decide something fast. He looked at my hand — the blood, the cut — and something moved across his expression.

"Please," I said. My voice was almost gone. "I just need — please. Don't leave me here."

He said nothing for a moment.

The night pressed in around us. Somewhere back down the road, beyond the curve and the trees, a car door slammed.

His jaw tightened.

"Get in," he said.