Chapter 68 -
“He is going to kill you,” Nia said, her words slightly slurred. “When he finds out you raided his private collection.”
“He is going to try,” Micheal corrected with a lopsided grin. “Whether he succeeds depends on how fast I can run. And considering I can barely stand right now, my odds are not looking great.”
They both laughed, the sound too loud in the quiet room, edged with hysteria and exhaustion. Nia took a sip of her whiskey, the burn familiar now, almost comforting.
Micheal watched her over the rim of his glass, his expression shifting from amusement to something more serious, more penetrating. “You know what your problem is?” he asked suddenly.
Nia blinked at him, thrown by the change in tone. “What?” she asked warily.
“You care about him already,” Micheal said, each word deliberate and heavy with certainty.
Nia felt something cold and sharp pierce through the warm fog of intoxication. “I do not,” she said quickly, automatically, the denial coming out too fast to be convincing.
“Liar,” Micheal said, but there was no accusation in his voice, only a kind of gentle knowing. “You asked about Andrea.”
“So?” Nia said, defensive now. “I was curious. Everyone in this house treats her name like some kind of sacred thing. I wanted to understand why.”
“So you want to understand him,” Micheal said, pointing at her with his glass. Whiskey sloshed dangerously close to the rim but did not spill. “You want to know what made him the way he is. You want to know what broke him. That is not the curiosity of someone who does not care, Nia. That is the curiosity of someone who is trying to figure out if he can be fixed.”
Nia opened her mouth to argue, to insist that Micheal was wrong, that she was just trying to survive her captivity and understanding her captor was a strategic move, nothing more. But the words would not come. They stuck in her throat, tangled up with all the other lies she had been telling herself since the night she sat in Leo’s study looking at photographs.
Her silence hung in the air between them, heavy and incriminating.
“See?” Micheal said softly. “I am right.”
“You are drunk,” Nia said, but even to her own ears, it sounded weak.
“I am very drunk,” Micheal agreed cheerfully. “But alcohol does not make me wrong. It just makes me honest. And honestly, Nia Wallace, you are falling for my brother, and it is both the best and worst thing that could happen to either of you.”
Nia set her glass down with a sharp click against the floor. “I am not falling for him,” she insisted. “I am just trying to understand my situation. Trying to figure out how to survive in this house.”
“By asking about the woman he loved?” Micheal challenged. “By sitting on the floor at two in the morning, drunk on his whiskey, wanting to know every detail of the worst night of his life? That is not survival strategy, Nia. That is caring.”
“Stop it,” Nia said, but her voice cracked.
“Why?” Micheal asked. “Why does it scare you so much to admit that you care about him?”
“Because I should not!” Nia practically shouted. The words burst out of her like they had been building pressure for weeks, waiting for the right moment to explode. “Because he kidnapped me, Micheal. He took me from my home, threatened my life, locked me in this mansion like some kind of prisoner. He has made it very clear that I am only alive because I might be useful. So why, why would I be stupid enough to care about someone like that?”
Micheal did not flinch at her outburst. He just sat there, watching her with those too-knowing blue eyes, waiting for her to finish.
“Because he is also the man who defended you to the Don,” Micheal said quietly. “He is the man who spent six hours looking at photographs with you because you wanted to help. He is the man who reads bedtime stories to his nephew and keeps Rosa employed even though she bosses him around like he is still ten years old. He is the man who could have let you die a dozen times over but chose to keep you alive instead.”
“That does not make him good,” Nia said desperately. “That just makes him complicated.”
“Exactly,” Micheal said, leaning forward. “He is complicated. He is broken and dangerous and haunted by ghosts. But he is also human. And you see that humanity, Nia. You see the man underneath the monster, and that is why you care. Because you understand what it is like to be broken and still trying to survive.”
Nia felt tears burning at the corners of her eyes. She pressed the heels of her hands against them, trying to force the tears back. “I do not want to care about him,” she whispered. “Caring about him is dangerous.”
“Everything in this house is dangerous,” Micheal pointed out. “The question is not whether caring is dangerous. The question is whether it is worth the risk.”
“And what do you think?” Nia asked, lowering her hands to look at him. “Do you think it is worth it?”
Micheal was quiet for a long moment. He stared down into his glass, swirling the last of the whiskey in slow circles. “I think,” he said finally, “that Andrea cared about Leo, and it cost her everything. But I also think that the time she had with him, the moments when he was happy and whole and believed in good things, those moments were real. They mattered. And maybe, even though it ended in tragedy, she would say it was worth it.”
“That is not reassuring,” Nia said.
“It is not supposed to be,” Micheal replied. “Love is not reassuring, Nia. It is terrifying. It is the ultimate gamble. You put your heart in someone else’s hands and hope they do not crush it. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do not. But either way, you cannot control it. You can only choose whether to take the risk or walk away.”
“I cannot walk away,” Nia said bitterly. “I am literally locked in this house.”
“You could walk away emotionally,” Micheal said. “You could decide right now that Leo is nothing more than your captor, that whatever feelings you are developing do not matter, that you are going to keep your heart locked up tight until this is all over. That is a choice you can make.”
“And you think I should not make that choice,” Nia said.
“I think you should make whatever choice feels right to you,” Micheal said. “But I also think you are already past the point of being able to lock your heart away. I think it is too late for that.”
Nia grabbed her glass and drained it in one long swallow, the whiskey burning all the way down. “I hate you,” she said without heat.
“No you do not,” Micheal said with a grin. “You love me. I am delightful.”