Layla
“Emma!” I scream as soon as I enter the door. “Emma, are you here?” The wall rattles as I kick the
door closed behind me.
“In the library,” comes the faint r eply. I hurry down the hallway and burst into the room. “Pack your
bags,” I tell her. My heart is beating so loudly I can hardly hear myself think. “We need to go.”
Emma frowns. “What?” “We’re not staying here tonight. We need to leave, now.” She pushes away
from the desk, her papers strewn all across it. Emma stands up and walks toward me with careful st eps,
like I’m an animal on the verge of panic.
Hell, that’s how I feel. I heard him. Leif. I heard him say those words, those horrible words, that made
me spin out. He’s not my knight in shining armor. He’s not the man who’s going to swe ep me off my feet
and fix all my problems.
He’s the source of all my problems. Lying, evil, despicable man.
“Layla, slow down,” Emma says, palms out. “What’s going on?”
I don’t have time for this. We need to leave now so that Leif doesn’t barge in here and try... try... I’m
not sure what
he would try, but all I know is I need to get far away from him.
Despite the screeching noise echoing in my head, I manage to have a rational thought: I need to tell
Emma what I heard so she understands why we can’t stay in this penthouse. So I take a de ep breath,
willing my chest to stop heaving so I can speak in a quasi-normal voice. “Leif is the one trying to push
Grandma and Grandpa out of their home. He’s the developer that’s been bullying them for months. We
need to go.” Panic edges the last word, and I extend a hand toward my sister.
Please, Emma, just listen to me for once. Just do what I say.
She puts a hand up, ink-stained fingers spread wide. “Wait.” My sister’s eyes widen. She stares at me
mutely for a few moments, then puts both her hands to her temples, transferring faint ink blots onto her
skin. She drops her arms, meeting my gaze head-on. “What? Did he plan this? Is that why he moved us
here?” She whirls around. “Is this a bribe? A setup? How. What. When. Who—Layla, no. How could he
do that? Did he know?”
“I don’t know.” My breath hitches on the last word, and I have to grip the doorjamb for support. “He
had to have known. He met them—he knew their names. Surely he looked over
contracts... negotiations...”
“So he was playing you?” Emma’s brows lower. “That doesn’t make sense. If he wanted to pressure
us into taking a bad deal, he wouldn’t have let us stay here. He would have squeezed us and made us
desperate. Instead, he made our lives easier.”
“Just—pack your bags!” The words explode out of me. “I can’t stay here, Em. I can’t. I have to go to
the mediation tomorrow with Grandma and Grandpa and I have to sit across the table from him and I can’t
be living in his apartment while I do it. I just can’t. I—”
I’m carrying his child.
A sob rips through my throat, and Emma’s arms are around me in an instant. “Okay,” she soothes.
“We’ll pack. We’ll be out of here in half an hour, okay? I’ll call Grandma and ask her if we can stay on
her couch for a couple of days. We can’t go back to our building; they’ve kicked everyone out and
planned to demolish it once it was inspected by the city officials. So we need to find somewhere new, but
we can do that from Grandma’s place.” She takes a de ep breath, and I cling onto the stability I see in the
set of her shoulders. “Everything will be fine. I’ll chain myself to the house if it comes to it. They won’t
make our grandparents homeless.”
I let out a snorting, wet laugh and pull away, wiping my eyes. “Yeah. Okay. You’re right. We’ve been
through worse. I’m going to go pack.”
I don’t tell my sister about the pregnancy test. I don’t tell her that this is all a thousand times more
complicated than she thinks, because moving out of this apartment isn’t the end of anything. It’s only the
start.
Fear and anger burn away the last wisps of my denial until all that’s left is brutal, merciless clarity.
A false positive? Please. I haven’t had my period in two months, I’ve been exhausted and nauseous
and my boobs have been two hunks of soreness bolted onto my chest.
I’m pregnant. With Leif’s child. Leif, the man who wants to kick my grandparents out of their home.
Who sees them as an inconvenience to his grand plans and fancy condos, not as people who have lived
their lives in a home they love. He met them, welcomed them into his home, all with the intention of
kicking them out of their own.
How could he look me in the eyes for a month? How could he make love to me, hold my hand, let me
spend time with his daughter? Was it all some ploy to get me wrapped up in his life so I couldn’t protest?
Was he trying to trick me?
As I tear open my closet—no, not my closet. Leif’s closet. As I tear open Leif’s closet to grab my
clothes, I can’t think of any other explanation. He had to know, which means he’s been planning this.
Can I really be with a man like that? Can I really look him in the eyes and see the tender, loving man I
thought he was?
Of course not. He’s not loving or tender or kind. He’s the cruel Viking king who sees new land and
wants to pillage it for his own gain.
I throw things into my bags, not bothering to fold anything. I can hardly see past the tears burning in
my eyes, and my breaths are short and staggered.
I heard him. I heard the hard, harsh words Leif said to his father. He was... cold.
That’s the man who’s made me laugh and blush and burn? That’s the man who teases his daughter?
How could someone be so loving at home and so ruthless at work?
Nothing makes sense. I’ll have to face Leif, but I can’t do it from this apartment, surrounded by his
things, feeling so very beholden to him.
I need to leave. I need to be out of here before he realizes I’m gone.
And when I grab my charger out of the wall, tossing it into my suitcase, I scan the room and see
nothing of mine. Emma is already wheeling her suitcase to the door. She grabs her extra pairs of shoes
sitting by the door, stuffing them into a reusable grocery bag. I watch her hesitate near the entryway closet
before finally grabbing our two new Balenciaga puffer jackets. She sees me watching and lifts them up.
“We can sell these,” she explains.
My heart turns to ash. I nod. “Yeah. It’ll pay for a d eposit for a new place.”
“Exactly.” She balls the jackets up and shoves them in her suitcase, then stands up straighter.
“Ready?” Emma
asks, a determined set in her jaw.
I give her a sharp nod. “Let’s go.”