“It hurts so much,” she whispered. “It hurts that I’m free and she’s not.”
“You got lucky, Pearl. If Crow hadn’t fallen in love with you, who knows what would have happened.”
“Yes, I’m very lucky. Or at least I was lucky.”
“He’ll come around,” I repeated. “He always does.”
“He hasn’t looked at me or spoken to me in days. My own husband wants nothing to do with me…”
My eyes shifted to the ground.
“But I’m angry with him too, so it’s not like I want to talk to him either.”
She was angry at him? I didn’t think she had any right to be. She was the one who stormed off and put herself in danger. “What did he do?”
“When I came back from seeing Tristan…he lost his temper.”
“What does that mean?”
“He slapped me.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “So?”
“So?” she countered. “I’m his wife, not his prisoner. He can’t treat me that way.”
“You walked right into the lion’s den. He needed to punish you so you would learn from your mistakes. If you ask me, he should have slapped you a few more times.”
Pearl looked at me like I was about to get a knife in the throat. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t listen. You put yourself at risk all the time. How will you learn? You’re like a child that needs to be spanked. But since you like being spanked, he needed to do something else.”
“I don’t put myself at risk all the time.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “You went shopping by yourself in Florence.”
“I can’t believe he told you about that.”
“And you took my place with Bones, leaving Crow without giving him a chance to do anything about it.”
“We both know he would have stopped me.”
“And he should have stopped you,” I snapped. “It was a stupid decision.”
She stared at me with fierce eyes that were as sharp as daggers. “You’re alive because of that stupid decision. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“But I wasn’t worth the risk. You should have let me die, Pearl.”
She shook her head.
“And now you’ve pulled this stunt. It’s obviously a pattern with you.”
She looked away, shutting me out.
“I know you don’t want to listen to me ridicule your decisions, but I’ve got to be honest. We live in a dangerous world. You need to be more careful. I’m not just saying this as Crow’s brother—I’m saying it as your brother too.”
Her pissed expression finally slipped away, and her features softened. She turned back to me, looking at me with blue eyes, unveiled and true. Her hostility had finally evaporated like water on a hot pan, the steam drifting above our heads and headed somewhere else. “I know, Cane.”
2
Pearl
Five days came and went.
Crow and I didn’t speak to each other. We took our meals in different rooms. I slept in the master bedroom, and he slept in a guest room on the second floor. Lars brought all of Crow’s clothes to the guest bedroom so he didn’t even have a reason to come into the bedroom we shared. Tensions seemed to escalate with every passing day rather than die out.
It was getting worse.
I was sick of the silent treatment. I was sick of the neglect. I would much rather listen to him yell at me than pretend I didn’t exist.
The loneliness was the worst part.
He told me he didn’t want to speak to me for an entire week. It’d only been five days, so I had to wait a little longer. Since I never usually listened to him, I decided to listen to him this one time. I pressed through the final few days, not eating or sleeping. Without his smell on the sheets, I couldn’t close my eyes. Not sharing my meals with him made me lose my appetite. I felt like I’d lost more than my husband—but my entire life.
On the eighth day, I waited at the foot of the staircase. He’d have to walk past me if he wanted to get to his room, and there was no way he would ignore me now. At five o’clock on the dot, he left his car with the valet then walked inside.
Lars greeted him and took his coat. “Good evening, Your Grace. Dinner will be ready in an hour.”
Crow’s only response was a nod. He loosened the buttons along the wrists of his collared shirt as he approached me. It took him three steps to realize I was standing there. He didn’t break his stride, but his eyes darkened noticeably.
He was still livid.
He rolled up his sleeves to his elbows and stopped at the foot of the stairs. I stood on the bottom step, but he was still taller than me. His cream-colored shirt and pale blue tie contrasted against the darkness of his hair and eyes. Even when he was smiling, he still took on a formidable appearance. He was dark like the shadows, constantly consumed by the night. He looked at me with cruel indifference, not a single drop of affection.