Rhys snorted out a laugh while Alex gave his best man a wry stare. “What exactly do you think we’ll be doing on our honeymoon?”
“Watching lions and other things I’d rather not think about my best friend and sister doing.” Josh shuddered with disgust. “Maybe I should join your safari to keep an eye on things, just in case.”
Alex and Ava left for their safari/beach honeymoon in Kenya and the Seychelles tomorrow.
There was a time when Ava’s aquaphobia prevented her from even going near the water, but she’d overcome it over the years with Alex’s help.
Jules rolled her eyes. “Leave them alone. You are not going on their honeymoon with them.”
“That would be disturbing in so many ways,” Bridget added.
“No one appreciates my good ideas,” Josh muttered. He looked at Rhys hopefully. “Larsen?”
“Let me put it this way,” Rhys said. “If you’d tried to tag along with me and Bridget on our honeymoon, I would’ve tossed you out of the plane after takeoff. Without a parachute.”
A laugh rose in my throat, but I tuned out the rest of my friends’ bickering when Christian turned me around and rested his hands on my hips.
“Your friends are something else.” He sounded half amused, half appalled, even though Alex and Rhys were his friends too.
“They’re…unique,” I acknowledged with a laugh. “But I love them.”
Somehow, four strangers that’d been randomly assigned to the same dorm room their freshman year of college had evolved into what we were now—a beautifully messy, perfectly imperfect family that’d gone through our share of ups and downs but made it through to the other side.
There’d been a time after graduation when I worried our friendship would fray outside the confines of campus and the structure of our college lives. The years had proven that wasn’t true. In fact, our friendship had strengthened after being tested by real life.
Natalia was my sister by blood, but Ava, Bridget, and Jules would always be my sisters by choice.
“If you’re up to it, I want to take you somewhere after the reception,” Christian said, drawing me out my thoughts. “It’ll be a quick trip. Two days max.”
My eyebrows rose. “Where?”
“It’s a surprise.” He kissed me. “Trust me.”
I did.
“I should take a photo of this moment,” Rhys drawled as he and Bridget passed us. My friends had paired up to dance after the music shifted to a slow song and Ava’s cousin Farrah and her husband Blake pulled her and Alex away. “A besotted Christian Harper. What a sight. I should blast it out to the Harper Security alumni network. The guys would love it.”
Christian narrowed his eyes. “You’re one to talk, Larsen. Didn’t I see pictures of you attending a royal tea party the other week? With a cat in your lap, no less.”
Color rose on Rhys’s cheekbones. “It was not a tea party,” he growled. “It was a lunch ceremony, and Meadows gets upset when we leave her alone for too long. At least I didn’t buy up all the fucking wheatgrass in the grocery store…”
Bridget caught my eye and shook her head.
Men, she mouthed, her expression one of exasperated affection.
I stifled a laugh.
The guys would never admit it, but their insults and arguments were how they showed affection for each other.
And as I swayed to the music in Christian’s arms, listened to the comforting rumble of his voice and the familiar warmth of my friends’ laughter, I felt something that’d eluded me for so much of my life.
Happiness, in its purest and most complete form.
55
CHRISTIAN
The night after the Volkovs’ wedding, I flew Stella and me to my hometown.
I hadn’t stepped foot in Santa Luisa, California since my parents died. It’d been two decades, yet the tiny seaside town along the northern coast remained the same.
Quiet streets, a quaint downtown, colorful stucco buildings.
Returning here was like stepping back in time. I had changed, but everything else remained the same.
Stella was quiet as we stopped in front of a warehouse in the town’s desolate industrial quarter. Our car was the only one on the street, and many of the warehouses’ metal doors had rusted with disuse, including the one before us.
I hadn’t told Stella the purpose of our visit, but she knew I grew up here and therefore, the visit must have something to do with my parents.
She was right.
I pressed a button, and the warehouse door clanked open with a groan. A cloud of stale must billowed out before it dissolved in the long-forgotten sunshine.
“Oh my God.” Stella’s stunned whisper echoed through the room when we walked inside and she saw what it contained.
Dozens of art pieces filled the small space, from priceless oil paintings to small modern sculptures. Many of the paintings had withered after twenty years of neglect, but a few resilient pieces remained intact.
“Welcome to my inheritance, my father’s stolen treasure trove,” I said, the words both hollow and self-deprecating. “My mother gave me the location in her note.”
It’d been coded—she knew how much I loved puzzles even as a kid—but I hadn’t tried cracking it until a few weeks ago. It’d taken me less than a minute.
“Have you visited before?” Stella asked softly.
“No.”
I’d made virtual arrangements before we arrived, but it was my first time seeing it in person.
I thought the sight of my father’s legacy would make me angry. This was what he’d dedicated his time and energy to instead of his only son. This was what killed him and, by extension, my mother and our family.
I should’ve felt the same rage I’d felt when I first read my mother’s goodbye note.
Instead, I felt nothing except the overwhelming desire to burn it to the ground—not out of spite, but out of exhaustion.
I was tired of whispers from the ghosts of my past.
Stella brushed her fingers over a nearby sculpture. They came away with a thin film of dust.
“What are you going to do with it all?”
“If they’re not savable, destroy them. If they are, donate them or return them to their original owners.”
All done anonymously, of course.
“Except…” I stopped in front of a familiar painting. “This one.”
Its gold frame gleamed in the weak light, and brown and green splashed across it a hideous approximation of art.
“Magda,” Stella surmised. “I recognize it from Dante’s gallery.”
“Yes.”
I’d tucked my mother’s note back inside its frame, then finally had Dante send her back where she belonged.
I stared at the swirls of color until they blurred into a dark kaleidoscope.
In hindsight, she was so inconsequential. A complicated problem of my own design, fabricated to shield me from my past.
Everyone thought she was important because she contained some big business secret or shocking revelation when the truth was so much simpler.
She represented the part of my past I’d never been able to let go of. A wound I’d covered with temporary bandaids to hide the festering disease that’d been eating me alive from the inside out for decades.