Anastasia’s POV:
I put the phone on the table between Marcus and me and switched it to speaker.
Not because I had decided to trust Elena. Not because the things she was saying had earned that yet. But because Marcus had a right to hear whatever came next in real time rather than through my filtered version of it afterward and I was not going to make that decision for him the way people had been making decisions for both of us for longer than either of us had been aware of.
He looked at the phone when I set it down.
He looked at it the way you looked at something that had the power to hurt you and that you were going to look at anyway because the alternative was looking away and he had been looking away for too long already.
I nodded at him.
He nodded back.
“Elena,” I said. “You’re o
