With This Ring

“You knew Maxim before Anna did. Tell me, when you heard about what he had supposedly done to her family, were you shocked, or unsurprised? Did he seem like the kind to so heartlessly do something like that?”

The truth was I had been shocked out of my skin.

For that whole day I had walked around in a distraught daze. Maxim had intrigued me from the first moment I had fallen on him from the tree on his estate. Thereafter, I had watched him when he wasn’t looking, but acted like he didn’t exist when he was around. Even so, I was irrevocably and irresistibly drawn to that strangely intense boy who stared people into the ground and hardly ever said a word. That secret dream or fantasy of him being my dark prince shattered into a million pieces with Anna’s words.

It was as if a switch flipped in my head. And I began to hate him with every fiber in my being… but now according to Levan, perhaps without reason.

Was Levan right? Was… I wrong? Was there actually something more? Something I had missed? Then I remembered Anna’s white face. No, she was not lying. How could I even doubt her? It was Levan who did not know the truth. Angry with myself for being so easily convinced I turned and made my way back to my room. I found my phone and for a moment thought to wait for courtesy’s sake given the time of the night, but I decided against it. I needed him to know that I had absolutely no respect for him whatsoever.

He didn’t pick up. I threw the phone on the bed in annoyance especially at the way my stupid heart was pounding and then moved to lay down. A few more minutes passed before I reached for my phone and tried again.

He picked up on the third ring.

“Yes,” he said brusquely.

Ripples of awareness rushed through me at the hard, sure tone of his voice. “It’s Freya.”

“I know.”

My fingers clenched around my phone. Of course he would. He could never ever be taken unawares and always had way too many tricks up his sleeve. I wondered then why I was even bothering when he would probably at the end of the day just make me believe exactly what he wanted me to. “You know what, no need,” I said and ended the call. Bastard didn’t call back and after an hour I slipped into an uneasy sleep.

“Are you okay?” Britney asked.

“Yeah why?”

“Well, you’ve been staring at that brick wall outside the window for the last ten minutes.”

I blinked and returned my gaze back to our company’s website that I was supposed to be updating. I didn’t see a thing but my mind was running, until I just had to speak.

“Your dad wouldn’t marry you off to someone… someone abusive, would he?”

She looked at me with an incredulous expression. “What are you talking about? Of course he wouldn’t?”

“Hmm,” I said, and slinked back into my head.

“What are you thinking of now?”

“If my father were to think that Maxim was abusive towards me, perhaps he would call this ridiculous marriage thing off.”

Britney, rightly, looked incredulous. I understood how she felt because I was entertaining thoughts that no sane person would or should, but I was getting desperate.

“And how do you want to pull that off?” she asked sarcastically. “Provoke him into throwing you down a high-rise building?”

“A flight of stairs might do the trick.”

“Freya!” she cried, her expression horrified.

“Fine!” I groaned and returned my gaze back to my computer.

“Fine what exactly, Freya?”

“Fine, I’ll stop trying to save myself from a lifetime of pain and bitterness.”

She sighed. “Have you even spoken to Maxim?”

I reacted defensively as the question hit too close to home. “Spoken to him about what?”

“About what his brother mentioned the other day.”

I scowled at her.

“Hear me out, Freya. I know I don’t … I know I can’t fully grasp the gravity of what happened with your friend—”

‘No, you can’t,” I cut her off.

She ignored the interruption and kept going. “I can’t, but perhaps it’s time to revisit it. Perhaps it’s time to ask Maxim what happened, you know, from his point of view.”

“He would just lie and she can’t defend herself.”

“Okay, so you want to be true to her memory, but what if there is something more… something Anna didn’t get?”

I stared at her for the longest time without knowing what to say, but I did know how I felt. Suffocated, by everyone… by a possible scenario that they insisted I hear… but I wanted to keep believing in Anna. I had to. I couldn’t betray her. I was the only one she trusted. If her spirit was watching I wanted her to know I was faithful to her to the very end. A mere man couldn’t turn me against her.