It had never actually needed protecting.
It had only needed my mother to have something to be afraid of, so that she would always have a reason to keep control.
The scandal she had murdered our happiness to prevent turned out, when it finally arrived, to be a Tuesday.
She understood.
I watched her understand, watched the last of her power leave her like water going out of a cracked glass.
She got to her feet, drew her ruined dignity around her as best she could, and walked into the elevator without another word.
The doors closed.
She was gone.
Chapter 22 — On My Knees
The apartment went quiet, just the low hum of the city forty floors down.
I turned around.
Yelena was standing by the couch with Tobias and Thaddeus pulled against her sides, and she was looking at me — not as the Ravensworth heir, not as the man who’d vanished six years ago, but as a man who had just set his entire inherited world on fire in his own living room and stood there and watched it burn rather than take one more step away from her.
I crossed the room.
And I did the only thing my body knew how to do.