man, Alik.”
He shook his head. “It took a good man to show me just how far gone I was. But I have changed. Now I’m just a corporate killer.” He shook his head and stood. “And that’s my story, Jada.”
“It’s not over yet. And you did something different here. You turned down working for a corporation that violated your ethics. To appease a conscience I know you have.”
“Whatever I have, whatever I feel…it’s because of Leena.”
“That’s how it should be. It’s the same for me. She…she saved my life.” And so did you. The words hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she held them back. She only looked at him. Because she wasn’t sure if they were true. Alik had torn her from her comfort zone. Taken her from friends, from the life she knew, from everyone who had an expectation of her and left her feeling like she was drifting out at sea. Free. Terrifying.
“Do you want to know what this says?” he asked, lifting his arm and exposing the words written in ink beneath.
“What?”
“Little thieves are hanged. Great thieves escape.” He lowered his arm. “I was a great thief. And I escaped. I was young and cocky, so I had this tattooed on my body to let the world know that it was my greatness that would keep me from getting caught. But you know what? You can’t escape your past. I escaped arrest. I was never killed by an enemy. But my past remains, and I am trapped in it. A creation of it. So you see, no thief escapes, princess. Not even me.”
She touched his bicep, her fingers drifting over the muscle. “Will you punish yourself forever?” Will you?
Again, she ignored her own thoughts.
“I don’t have to. I don’t seek to punish myself, but you asked what made me, and the simple fact is, it was nothing good that had a hand in my creation. What I am simply is. It’s not me punishing myself, or the world punishing me. But my existence is a consequence for everything that has come before. There’s no changing it.”
She had seen Alik angry. She’d seen him totally out of his depth. She’d seen tenderness, deeply hidden but evident, when he looked at Leena. But she’d never heard him sound hopeless. Tonight, he sounded hopeless. He sounded like he wanted more than what he was.
And it broke her. Because he didn’t see what she did. He didn’t see what he could be. But he did want more. He was changing. And he was capable of change, no matter what he thought.
He turned to go and her heart slammed hard against her breastbone. She craved him. By her side, in her bed, her arms. No matter what he’d done, no matter where he’d been.
This dangerous, difficult, damaged man.
She wanted to reach out, to offer comfort. To take comfort. But she was too raw. She needed distance, too. Needed escape.
So she let him go. Because the alternative was calling him back and further cementing a bond that she couldn’t handle.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WE NEED TO TAKE LEENA OUT,” Alik said, the next morning at breakfast. “She hasn’t been anywhere except the back patio the whole time we’ve been in Paris.”
“I’ve barely been anywhere but the back patio,” Jada said, lifting her mug to her lips and leaning back in her chair, soaking in the early-morning window of sunshine that filtered through the trees, casting spots of light and shadow onto the brick floor.
“Liar, you walk to the Eiffel Tower every morning.”
“And I bring Leena with me.”
“Still, I think…It seems she hasn’t been out enough.”
For a moment, the strangeness of it all hit her full force. She was in Paris, had been for a few weeks, sleeping with a man she’d only just met. Married to the man. And the things she did with him…the things she wanted from him.
Just thinking of it made her hands shake.
She looked down at her hands, trying to orient her thoughts. And she realized she hadn’t put Sunil’s ring on her right hand that morning. She’d put on the rings Alik had given her, but nothing else.
She looked back up at him. “You want us all to go out together,” she said, realizing slowly that that’s what was happening. That he didn’t know how to articulate it, or didn’t want to. She wondered if he was having the same, surreal moment she was.
“That seems…normal.”
“It is.”
He nodded once, sharply, as though he’d known, the whole time, that his