Again, I went to turn, but she leaned into me, pinning me against the window seat. “I bet you are curious how you didn’t feel me coming, aren’t you? How you could sit here and be so completely distracted by the scene below that you didn’t feel me coming up right behind you, let alone the time it took me to deal with your little entourage.”
No!” I tried to turn again, panicking that she’d killed them. “Mika! They didn’t do anything to you. Please tell me you didn’t…”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, come on. I am a savage in my own right. But I’m no monster. I didn’t kill them. Would you like me to lift the wall around you so you can hear?”
I choked back my fear, nodding my head. “Please, Mika.”
“Please, Mika, Please, Mika. You are pathetic!”
She must have lifted whatever barrier she’d placed around me, because the sounds of all three women came crashing in around me as they struggled against what sounded like bindings. It was a mixed sense of relief that they weren’t dead but still causing my stomach to drop knowing they were not out of danger.
“Now,” Mika twirled a lock of my hair around her finger. “Let us discuss your role in our beloved Kane’s life.”
She backed up, allowing me to finally turn and look at her. To look around the room. Seeing my friends tied and gagged, all lying on the floor caused bile to rise up in the back of my throat. Two men in armor stood by the door. And Mika, posed, casually checking her fingernails, eyeing me.
She didn’t let me speak. Instead, she paced before me with a smirk on her face. “He loves me. He’s just angry at me for taking on a lover, and you’re his revenge. You are nothing more than a distraction and a means to anger me into jealousy. A game of which I will admit he’s won. But now that I am ready to give him his way, I need you out of mine.”
I tucked my hand behind me, hiding the ring Kane had given me when he proposed, not wanting to take the chance of her seeing it. “If he loves you, then would he not tell you? Would he not call this off before more people get hurt?”
“No!” She yelled. Calming herself, her head twitched. Then, as if she hadn’t had an outburst, she continued, “He needs me to prove myself and my dedication to him. And getting rid of you will do just that.”
My hand went to my stomach, realizing just how disposable she felt I was.
Flicking her wrist, she pursed her lips. “Oh yeah. That.” She said the word as if completely disgusted. “Well, I have to decide on that, now don’t I? I mean, he might be attached to the idea of having a kid. So, I can either kill you now and rid you of our lives completely, which, if you ask me, is my preferred path. Or I can lock you away somewhere until the baby is born, take the little parasite or two… however many you’re growing in there… and gift them to him later, dispatching you then.” She tapped her chin with one long, pointed fingernail.
“You’re deranged,” I breathed.
“You…” She pointed the same nail at me. But instead of finishing her sentence, a wicked grin fell across her lips.
The look in her eyes caused me to back up, climbing up onto the window seat. One hand on the wall and one on the half of the window that was closed, I watched her, trying to get a gauge on her next move. But she was so unhinged, that made her frighteningly unpredictable.
Trying to think of something, anything to get away from her and to Kane, I was at a loss. But as I shifted, I felt my foot against something hard on the windowsill. Recognition dawned on me that it must have been the water glass I’d been using.
I started sobbing. Letting the tears slide down my face as my cries grew loud, trying as best I could to draw her in. “Please don’t do this, Mika!”
“Oh, shut up!” She held her hands over her ears.
I was just hoping to make enough noise to cover up what I wanted to do, but her reaction was perfect. I slid my foot back, pushing the glass out of the window. It plummeted down to the cobblestone below, shattering at the feet of one of the soldiers by my estimate of where they had been standing before.
I wanted so badly to look down. To see that not only did Kane see where the glass came from but was on his way. But I didn’t want her to know what I’d done. I continued to sob, pretending as if I was getting a grip on myself.
And as I did, she lowered her hands, her nose wrinkled. “Ugh! How does he stand you?”
It took every bit of me not to snap back with a snide comment. “Please just don’t hurt my babies.”
“So, there are two?” She grinned evilly and walked over to me, yanking me off the bench. Pressing her hand to my stomach, she waited. “How do you know?”
“The prophecy,” I replied.
“Bah!” She yanked back. “Kane does not believe in such things. And even if it is true, one less brat to deal with when the other takes them out, and I’ll side with the stringer, making me in their favor. I am not worried.”
What little I ate rolled in my stomach. “How can you possibly think that he would love you when you’re like this? You’re cruel?”
She grabbed my hair and yanked me to the side. “Kane can be cruel. It is why I love him! Do not be fooled to think
