Chapter 72
Evelyn's POV
The moment Julian's Mercedes disappeared around the corner, I stepped back from the window.
I didn't remember walking there. Didn't remember pressing my palm against the glass like I could somehow reach through it and pull him back. Didn't remember how long I'd stood there watching the street below, searching for any sign of his car even though I knew he was already gone.
My legs gave out and I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold marble floor, my knees pulled up to my chest. The apartment felt too large suddenly, too empty, filled with nothing but the echo of his footsteps walking away and the ghost of words I couldn't take back.
What have I done?
The question echoed in the hollow space where my heart used to be before Vorkuta carved it out and replaced it with ice. Except the ice was melting now, dripping through my fingers no matter how hard I tried to hold it together, and underneath was something raw and bleeding that I didn't know how to protect.
I'd pushed him away. Watched those gray eyes go from warm to wounded to cold in the space of three sentences. Heard my own voice—flat, merciless, trained to kill without hesitation—tell him that last night was a mistake.
The lie tasted like battery acid on my tongue.
Because it wasn't a mistake. It was the most real thing that had happened to me in seven years. Since before Arthur's lawyers showed up at that dingy apartment with their briefcases full of salvation and strings. Since before I understood that love was just another word for leverage, and safety was an illusion wealthy men sold to desperate girls who should have known better.
Julian had looked at me like I was worth something more than my body count or my bank account or my usefulness as a political pawn. Had touched me like he was trying to memorize every scar, every broken piece, every part of me that the world said was too damaged to deserve tenderness.
And I'd repaid him by becoming exactly what he feared I was—another woman using him for protection, for resources, for whatever I needed before discarding him like everyone else in his life had done.
Private.
His voice had cracked on that word and I'd heard the boy underneath the CEO mask, the one who'd learned early that love was conditional, that people left, that nothing good ever stayed.
I'd confirmed every one of his worst fears about himself in under five minutes.
My phone buzzed against the marble and I stared at it for a long moment before reaching for it with shaking hands. Part of me hoped it was Julian. That he'd somehow forgiven me already, that he'd figured out I was lying when I said an hour ago meant nothing, that he'd come back and make me admit the truth I couldn't speak out loud.
But the screen showed an alarm I'd set weeks ago. A reminder I'd set the day I returned to New York, when I'd realized that once I completed the Caldwell mission, I'd finally have what I'd never had before—time. Resources. The freedom to do what I should have done seven years ago, before Arthur had sent me away, before I'd learned that asking powerful men for help just gave them another way to control you.
Mother's case. Start investigation.
I closed my eyes and saw her face the way I remembered it from before—before the debt collectors and the loan sharks and the desperation that had driven her to borrow from people who collected interest in blood. She'd been beautiful once, my mother. Soft brown hair that fell in waves around her shoulders, warm eyes that crinkled when she smiled, hands that had held mine when I was scared and told me everything would be alright.
Those same hands had been cold and stiff when I'd found her in our apartment, the life beaten out of her by men who'd come to collect a debt she couldn't pay. Men who'd left her broken on our kitchen floor like garbage, like she was nothing, like her life had no value beyond the dollars she owed.
I'd been eighteen. Barely an adult. Too young to understand how the world worked, too naive to know that debts like that didn't just disappear when the debtor died. That they transferred to daughters. That men who killed for money didn't care about collateral damage.
Arthur had saved me from that fate. Had paid off the debt, had married me to give me his protection, had kept me safe in his golden cage while I'd tried to forget what I'd seen on that kitchen floor.
But I'd never forgotten. Not really. I'd just buried it deep, let Kholod train me to channel grief into precision, rage into efficiency, helplessness into lethal competence. Had told myself that someday, when I was free, when I had the skills and resources and time—
Someday I'd find the men who'd killed her.
Someday I'd make them pay.
That someday was now.
I pushed myself off the floor and walked to my bedroom on legs that felt steadier than they had a moment ago. Purpose did that—gave you something to focus on beyond the hollow ache of pushing away the only person who'd looked at you and seen something worth keeping.
I pulled open my closet and reached past the designer dresses and tailored suits, past the widow's weeds I'd worn to Arthur's funeral, until my fingers found the lockbox I'd hidden in the back corner.
Inside were things that had nothing to do with Evelyn Valentine, Arthur Winthrop's respectable widow. Inside were the pieces of who I'd been before—before the marriage, before Vorkuta, before I'd learned to kill without hesitation.
Before I'd become the Wraith.