Chapter 136

**Hadassah POV**

I don’t know how long I’ve been soaking in the waters for, but my skin is pruning. Fingers pads wrinkled with the bubbles long since dissipated in the lukewarm breadth, welling until the brim because of how many times I had to add hot water during inestimable intervals. The freestanding bathtub is positioned near the window, a deep, freestanding tub made of smooth porcelain overlooks the sunset-soaked ocean. It includes smart underwater LED mood lighting—chromotherapy. Both the shower and bath areas are equipped with chromotherapy lights, color-changing that is meant to promote relaxation or rejuvenation.
Neither has happened for me. With so many, an overwhelming amount, I can’t even pinpoint where the stress stems from—Torin, Tomasso—my fugitive status—Orian.
The door bursts open and my head whips up to see Emilia. I rest back down disinterestedly. She closes the door and ambles inside. She surveys the polished Carrara marble, in soft white with subtle gray veins, covering the floor and walls.
“As you can see, this bathroom is occupied,” I say flatly, closing my eyes. “There’s literally four others.”
“Oh, I know,” she chirps.
“I really gotta start locking the doors,” I mutter to myself.
Emilia unbuttons her high rise jeans and starts stripping… slowly.
“The hell are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
I look away fast. When she’s completely naked, she goes to the other end of the bathtub and slips inside, settling until the waterline is just above her breasts. Fortunately, the bathtub is massive enough to accommodate two people without any of our bare limbs brushing against the other awkwardly.
She gives me a teasing smile before she holds onto the inside of the handles so she can swoop around in the water, letting go with her back facing me before she tosses a suggestive glance over her shoulder. I remain stubbornly still before she twists deeper so we can lock eyes for a fleeting moment.
“And here I thought you were a girls’ girl?”
“Wash your own damn back,” I say with clenched brows.
She turns back around to fix me with an unblinking stare—seriously, she’s barely blinking.
“This is weird,” I point out.
“Ever since you appeared, my life has been nothing but weird,” she retorts. “And other words I don’t care to mention.”
“Sweetheart, you’re the one that was hunting for me,” I rebutted with a cheeky quirk of my lips. “Not the other way around.”
“I was going after criminal syndicates,” she counters with a conviction that emulates my own. “You just happened to be in my way. And my way in… much deeper than I had ever imagined.”
I observe her with a critical stare. “Do you regret it?”
“Sometimes,” she admits, her hand slips out of the water to draw idle tracings in the surface, her finger streaking through, creating a soft rippling sound. “But this is bigger than me and you.”
“Exactly.”
“Yet even the noblest ambitions are rendered hollow if they come at the cost of those we hold dear.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Read that at the back of a fortune cookie or something?”
She snorts and shakes her head wryly.
“Why are you really here?” I probe.
“He misses you,” she says simply.
“I’m right here,” I reply expressionlessly.
Unimpressed, she gives me a jaded look. “Seriously, you haven’t spoken to him in days. Barely even looked at him—”
“I’ve seen all I needed to see of him,” I say with a measure of bitter brutality that instantly informs Emilia about what I’m actually referring to.
She leans back and rests the back of her head against the sill before covering her eyes with her hands.
“I see it’s time to have that conversion.”
I shake my head aggressively. “No,* never*.”
“Hadassah?”
“You think I want to talk to you about that with the image of him with his—”
“Ah!” she screams back childishly to cut me off.
“Ah?” I exclaim mockingly before I flick her with water and she gapes at me. “How the hell do you think I feel?”
Her lips tense before she launches a spray of water at my face. My head whips to the side, my vision glassy as I blink rapidly.
“I wouldn’t know how you feel because you won’t talk to us!”
With both arms, I make a tsunami motion to propel a wave at her, drawing out a sharp gasp.
“Because there’s nothing to talk about!”
I stand up, fully naked before I use my foot to thrust a larger wave at her and she chokes back a scream. I climb out and I yank a white towel to tie it around myself, the ends reaching above the knees. Emilia rushes out and steals the other before wrapping the cotton towel around herself quickly.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Before I can reach the door, she tugs me back harshly so I spin back to face her.
“We are pitted against powerful enemies,” she says with dark wisps of hair clinging to her wet face. “How long do you think we will last if the in-fighting endures.”
A flare of long-held anger tears out the words from my chest. “Calum and I will be fine because it’s us. Always has been and now you come here trying to play peacemaker as if you’ve known him since forever. You don’t. I do. When I want to talk to him, I will.” I move to walk away but I jerk back around to face her again. “And baby girl, grab me like that again and you and me are going to have a problem.”
She bobs a careless shoulder. “Don’t we already have one?”
“I can list about ten more.”
“Let me add,” she says with a hot spike in her voice. “You can be a real bitch when you want to be.”
“The hell did you just call me?” I holler back.
The bathroom door shoots open and Ellis steps into the threshold, his silhouette blocking out anything else beyond him with his hair whispering to the top of the door frame. His eyes fall on me, taking in my half-naked body assessingly before it darts to Emilia then the scattered pools of water on the shiny floor.
“Not sure what happened here,” he says with the stoic mask on his face before it slips off. “But I wished I was here to see it.”
“Argh,” I spit out with a disgusted face. “You’ve been spending way too much time with Calum.”
“Someone has to,” he responds, his solemn reserve sealing back up, crevice by crevice. “You’ve been ignoring him for over a week now.”
“*See!*” Emilia points out with excited laughter. “Even the human hulk has noticed.”
I back away with my hands raised in mock. “So you both ganging up on me now?” I drop my hands back down theatrically. “How about we focus on the fact that Magnus Quinque contains five encrypted books. How many do we have in our possession—none. One with Torin, the other with Santos and the other three are God knows where. Our countries have branded us traitors and we have criminals gunning after us. Calum sulking over my silence is the least of my worries.”
“No, you’re too worried about what he’s doing to me.”
The slow-turn I do is the eerie equivalence of a creature from a horror film.
When I face her again, I lunge at the girl before a muscular forearm traps me and Ellis whips me around. Being manhandled enrages me even more before I rotate again and with one arm he hurls me over his shoulder to better restrain me—his arm locked around me with an effortless grip. He steps out of the en suite and motions her out.
“You might want to leave. So I can… contain her.”