That gets her attention. Her face comes alive, and she flicks her eyes to me. Her expression is annoyed, closed off. She crosses her arms. There’s anger and hurt, but there’s also something else, something familiar.
It’s enough to make me think that Kolya hasn’t completely broken my best friend.
Good. That means it’s worth a try.
“Sylvie,” I repeat, keeping my voice low. “Please. We have to get out of here. Help me.”
She snorts. “Helpyou? Why, so you can get back to your boyfriend and forget about me again?”
The words hit hard, and they hurt.
I neither flinch, nor do I argue. I don’t try to excuse what happened. Instead, I let her be angry, because the anger is hersand she’s earned it. The worst thing I could do right now is take it from her.
“Do you have any idea what happened to me? What I’ve been through? Hell. Pure hell.”
I say nothing. I watch her wait for the defense that doesn’t come.
“Youleft,” she says. Her tone is sharp, a knife slipping through my ribs. “You were taken, and then you were gone. And I was all alone.” She glances away for a moment. “I get that you couldn’t help me in the moment. But what about after? Gabriel has power, money, resources.”
“It’s not that simple. There’s a war about to happen and…” I trail off, reminding myself not to put up a defense.
“I waited,” Sylvie goes on. “I thought you’d come back. I thought you’d send someone.Something. But there was nothing. Just nothing.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“You’re right,” I say with a nod. “I left you. I told myself there was nothing I could do. But that was a lie. Maybe. I don’t know. The truth is, I was scared. I didn’t know where I was, what Gabriel had planned for me. I didn’t know whether he wanted to kill me or make me his slave. But I can say this—I never stopped thinking about you.”
Silence. Her mouth forms into a hard line, her eyes flicking with slight surprise, as if she expected me to put up more of a fight.
I go on.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to help me. To help us. You’re mad at me, and I understand that completely. You can curse my name until the end of time, and I’ll say you’re absolutely right for doing it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to save ourselves now. It’s not too late.”
She looks away, her brow knitting in worry.
“You don’t understand what it was like after you left. When Kolya took me, he was patient. He explained what the world was really like, how people like him and Gabriel and the rest of the Bratva and Camorra survived. He told me that the world I knew was just a fairy tale. He took care of me.”
She turns her eyes to me.
“Don’t forget I was in the same place you were, Thea—scrubbing toilets, coming home to a rat-trap apartment I could barely afford. Kolya showed me a different life. Sure, I had to do… things.” I shudder at the word, putting it out of my mind as quickly as I can. “But for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about money or anything like that. And I had a place. It sounds screwed up, but I had aplacewith him, here.”
“It sounds like he isolated you,” I say carefully. “Cutting you off from everybody but himself, making him your whole world.”
“Isn’t that what Gabriel did to you?” she asks. “He didn’t let you leave his home, told you where to sleep, what to wear, how to please him.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t like that. We only did what I wanted.”
Her eyes flash, as if the idea of being asked what she wants is a luxury she’d long forgotten about.
“It’s different for me,” I say softly. “Gabriel was sworn to protect me. He’s?—”
“I know, I know. You’re some Bratva princess and he’s your brave knight in shining armor. You’ve got that life to look forward to. What about me? As soon as I leave here, I’m nothing again. Back to being a nobody, scrubbing toilets for a living.”
“You’re not a nobody. You’re my friend. Or at least you were. Sylvie, we can leave here and start over.Youcan start over. I can’t leave you here. I can’t.”
My hand drops to my stomach. Her eyes follow the movement.