“Come.” Leander’s voice gentled as he crouched beside her. “I promised I would take you away from them and I will.”
Leander had been blind with rage since leaving the hotel, but he had arrived below as Feodor was stepping from Ilona’s car, her bag and other belongings in hand.
“Wait here,” Leander had ordered the PA. “We won’t be long.”
Feodor had tried to stare him down and Leander had spared one moment to appreciate the man’s loyalty to Ilona, but Leander was collecting his wife and that was that.
He physically gathered her up, ignoring her half-hearted attempt to be set on her feet.
“I don’t want to go home with you,” she said, voice filled with the ache of her disappointment in him.
“The yacht is waiting.” To take them on their honeymoon. He’d been looking forward to it and she seemed to have been, too. Before.
What a bloody mess.
“They said it was gone. That you left.”
He could hear the knife that had been to her heart. He paused to absorb how badly he’d failed her today. He hated failure. Hated it.
“That was a lie told to distress you.” It had worked. She was insubstantial in his arms. The corners of her mouth dragged down, her sadness profound enough to send a fracture across his chest. “Do you have anything here that you want to take?”
“No.”
Hercules turned his head, sending Leander’s gaze into the corner. Her wedding gown was draped over a chair, it’s white layers like a snowdrift blown into a corner, but the kind that had weathered winter and was melting in spring, streaked by dirt and stains, no longer pure and pretty.
She had been excited to wear that gown. Leander had seen it when she had told his mother about it. He was so sorry in that moment. So sorry that all his precautions had been against infiltrators and criminals. No one was supposed to be able to get to her today. It hadn’t occurred to him that Midas would send the police after her.
With one final look of contempt toward Hercules, he made the lethal promise, “I’ll see you at the next board meeting.”