My tone was bitter and cast a weighty silence across the room. “Bianca, I'm sorry if I'm making you uncomfortable. You’ve just walked into a minefield and you don’t understand what is going on, but Levan’s family and I don’t exactly have the best of relationships. Which makes me wonder why he’s here.” I turned on him aggressively. “Did your brother send you? What exactly did he ask you to check on?”
“If you were doing well,” he answered easily.
I smiled tightly. “I happen to know it wouldn’t spoil his day if I fell into a ravine tomorrow, but if we’re all going to pretend to play this game, then please let him know that I'm doing just great. And that he should please stay away from me so that I can continue to do even better.”
“Why do you hate Maxim so much?’ Levan asked.
“Are you seriously asking me that? Don’t you know?”
“I am asking exactly that,” he said.
“He killed Anna,” I screamed.
“He didn’t kill Anna, she took her own life,” he said calmly.
I could feel my anger begin to take over. “And whose fault was that? Your brother wiped out her family.”
“Have you ever stopped to find out why, or what actually happened?”
“The whole of fucking Russia knew what happened. He did it to prove himself to your father. Anna’s father was challenging your father with some lawsuit and Maxim took him out to prove that he was qualified to join his father’s army of demons.”
“Your father’s business is not any smaller or less violent than ours, Freya.”
“Perhaps, but no one is as evil as Maxim. How else could a fucking nineteen-year old kid kill a man and his wife in cold blood. All for some accolade?”
The room was deadly silent.
Levan frowned. “Is that what you were told?”
“It is what I know,” I argued.
He rose to his feet and held out his hand to his fiancée. “Let’s go, Bianca.”
“Of course, you’ll always be on his side.”
He didn’t say a word and began to walk. Bianca looked torn, apologetic towards me and yet understanding of Levan. Britney was just confused.
I felt hurt and wasn’t satisfied enough with my taunt. “Oh, and for old time’s sake, since you said that we were ‘friends’ could you let me know what your family’s plan is with this whole marriage situation? Is Maxim trying to go grand this time? Get married to me, then take out my whole family? Just let me know, friend.”
Levan smiled, and when I saw that it wasn’t in offense but mockery, it made me very uncomfortable. “You’ve always been really cocky, Freya,” he said “and I understand that it’s because you’ve wanted to always be on guard. But you need to sometimes put your pride down so you can figure out the truth. You knew Maxim before Anna met him. Tell me, when you heard what he had supposedly done to her family, were you shocked or unsurprised? Did he seem like the kind to so heartlessly do something like that?”
“Maxim is lethal.”
“And so are you, perhaps even more so than he will ever be. Otherwise, how else can you so easily accuse him of all that you just have without knowing the actual truth?”
“Truth. What do you know about the truth? Anna told me this herself, a few days before she committed suicide.”
I was shaking. How dare he? How dare any of them even come close to me.
“Someday, ask Maxim what really happened and why he did what he did. I know you enough to know that after hearing it you definitely will not feel as you do now. You will understand. I hope you can come to our wedding, friend. Take care.”
He took his fiancée’s hand and walked out of our house.
Chapter Fourteen
Freya
I couldn’t sleep.
It had been two days and I still couldn’t sleep. It was not so much the pain of the wound on my back but Levan’s words that haunted me.
“You need to sometimes put your pride down so you can figure out the truth… after hearing it you definitely will not feel as you do now.”
My back hurt, so I got out of bed carefully, and headed out to the kitchen. I pulled the fridge open and looked at the contents. A few minutes later I was still standing there deep in thought. I brought myself back to the present and wondered why I had opened it in the first place. I couldn’t recall why. I certainly wasn’t hungry. So I shut it and was thrown into the darkness of the kitchen.
“You knew Maxim before Anna did. Tell me, when you heard about what he had supposedly done to her family, were you shocked, or unsurprised? Did he seem like the kind to so heartlessly do something like that?”
The truth was I had been shocked out of my skin.
For that whole day I had walked around in a distraught daze. Maxim had intrigued me from the first moment I had fallen on him from the tree on his estate. Thereafter, I had watched him when he wasn’t looking, but acted like he didn’t exist when he was around. Even so, I was irrevocably and irresistibly drawn to that strangely intense boy who stared people into the ground and hardly ever said a word. That secret dream or fantasy of him being my dark prince shattered into a million pieces with Anna’s words.
It was as if a switch flipped in my head. And I began to hate him with every fiber in my being… but now according to Levan, perhaps without reason.
Was Levan right? Was… I wrong? Was there actually something more? Something I had missed? Then I remembered Anna’s white face. No, she was not lying. How could I even doubt her? It was Levan who did not know the truth. Angry with myself for being so easily convinced I turned and made my way back to my room. I found my phone and for a moment thought to wait for courtesy’s sake given the time of the night, but I decided against it. I needed him to know that I had absolutely no respect for him whatsoever.
He didn’t pick up. I threw the phone on the bed in annoyance especially at the way my stupid heart was pounding and then moved to lay down. A few more minutes passed before I reached for my phone and tried again.
He picked up on the third ring.
“Yes,” he said brusquely.
Ripples of awareness rushed through me at the hard, sure tone of his voice. “It’s Freya.”
“I know.”
My fingers clenched around my phone. Of course he would. He could never ever be taken unawares and always had way too many tricks up his sleeve. I wondered then why I was even bothering when he would probably at the end of the day just make me believe exactly what he wanted me to. “You know what, no need,” I said and ended the call. Bastard didn’t call back and after an hour I slipped into an uneasy sleep.
“Are you okay?” Britney asked.
“Yeah why?”
“Well, you’ve been staring at that brick wall outside the window for the last ten minutes.”
I blinked and returned my gaze back to our company’s website that I was supposed to be updating. I didn’t see a thing but my mind was running, until I just had to speak.
“Your dad wouldn’t marry you off to someone… someone abusive, would he?”
She looked at me with an incredulous expression. “What are you talking about? Of course he wouldn’t?”