Page 121 of Mine Again
My pulse kicks up.
I turn to keep walking but not before flipping off the camera tucked beneath the roof eaves.Let him watch that.
The trail curves uphill now, steeper than before, winding through thick trees. My thighs burn, the borrowed boots rubbing against my heels, but I keep going. Twigs whip against my legs. The wind hisses through the trees like it’s warning me back. But I don’t stop.
At the top, the forest opens into a wide clearing, a lookout of sorts. There’s even a bench, like it was made for watching sunsets over whatever view waits on the other side.
I step forward and turn in a slow circle. The full scene hits me all at once.
Ocean… stretching far into the distance, with only the faintest trace of land on the horizon. Towering trees. Endless sky. Rocky cliffs dropping into churning waves.
No roads. No buildings, other than the two I’ve already seen. And most definitely, no people.
Gobsmacked, I stumble to the bench and drop onto it. My legs give out more from disbelief than exhaustion.
I sit there, strands of hair whipping harshly into my face, and stare out at the jagged coastline and the restless, gray-blue sea.
No wonder it was so easy for Luca to let me walk out the door.
Chapter Forty-Four
Isabella
Wherever we are, it’s surrounded by water on all sides.
I’m on a fricking island.
Luca knew all along that I couldn’t get away.
And by the looks of it, there’s no dock and no boat. The only way off this place seems to be by helicopter. I need to enter the Matrix and download a pilot’s manual or something.
Hold on…
If no one else lives here, does that mean Luca is the pilot?
I don’t want to be impressed by that, but a sliver of awe sneaks in before I can stop it.
I fold my hands in a prayer stance around my nose and breathe out slowly, letting my gaze drift across the view.
Silence surrounds me, the wind my only companion. It’s steadier now, as if calming down with me.
In my periphery, I catch sight of the black ink on my finger and hold it out in front of me.
The skin around Luca’s name is red and agitated, just like my heart.
Why didn’t he come and get me before the wedding? Or when Sebastian first entered the scene? He clearly knew about him. So whywait until the last fucking second?
He could have saved me the humiliation of walking down the aisle to a man I barely knew, hoping that it would all work out. He could have shown up. Said something. Anything.
But he didn’t.
He let me walk toward another man. Let me plan a life with him.
I feel abandoned all over again.
The longer I stare at my finger, the more it throbs. Though I’m not sure if it’s really my finger or my heart that’s hurting the most.
I rub at the ink carefully, hoping against hope that it’s a joke, and he used a marker.But nothing smudges. Nothing fades.
