I blinked into the darkness, throat raw.
“Why always hurting?” he mumbled. “I want… I want us to go. Far. We can live… somewhere with trees. You and me… I don’t like this place.”
I turned just enough to hold him. Weakly. Barely. But enough. He wiped his nose on my sleeve and tried to smile.
“I’ll save money, okay? I’ll save a lot. And we run away. You and me. We go. Like magic.”
My lips parted. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to promise him that soon, very soon, we’d be free. But all I could do was hold him tighter and whisper, “I’m trying, Z. I swear I’m trying.”
He nodded against me. Then he fell asleep in my arms.
The only safe thing I had left.
And Hakeem? He was gone.
He was off somewhere across the world with Margaret, the woman who faked her death and came back acting like the universe owed her every stolen minute.
Photos of them were everywhere. Posing by the river in Paris. Locked together at the Louvre. Wrapped up in each other in some icy blue cave in goddamn Antarctica.
America’s most feared heir and his first love, back from the dead.