#25

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

'I have never been more confused about my choices, or what those choices might mean for me.'

"I can't imagine how you're feeling."

The cool evening air billows around us. The small open space located at the back of the headquarters is a quiet reprieve from the madness inside. It's been two days since I found out Luke was alive. Two days and I can't stop the twisted feeling in my stomach each time I think about him. I've managed to avoid both Prescott brothers for the two days I have spent here and instead demanded audiences with every special agent who knows about this Mutiny group and what their plan is for stopping them. I've been so consumed in meetings and conferences between Australian and British intelligence officers that I haven't realised how much time has passed.

Luke wheels himself out to the bench beside me and stops in front of it.

"I thought you were dead,"

"Eva," Luke's voice brings tears to my eyes. The softness of it, the familiarity. It was a voice I never expected to hear ever again.

"I thought you were dead, Luke." I don't dare look at him. "I was a shell of myself for a better part of a year because I thought you were dead."

"You have no idea how much I have missed you," his voice cracks and I finally dare myself to look at him and I wish I hadn't. The look on his face makes me want to break back in two and shatter again to pieces. "Every single day, wondering what you were doing, how you were, thinking of all the things I missed."

My heart bangs like a symphony against my ribs and I look into those eyes I once thought the world started and ended in and I let out a shuddery breath. "And what now, Luke? Am I supposed to go back to my life and pretend I don't know you're alive?"

It's comical really. Laughable. How is anyone supposed to simply go back to normal after this?

How can they ask me to?

"You're supposed to move on," Luke's words echo into the night. "You're supposed to marry my brother."

I let out a noise, "Your brother—"

"Is in love with you," Luke's eyes trace my face and I watch how the corner of his own pinch as if it pains him to admit it.

"You know nothing,"

"No Eva, you know nothing and it's only now I know how my actions have brought us here. Call it karma but you're supposed to marry him, Eva. You probably always were."

I choke out a bitter laugh because it seems like the only appropriate way to express the insanity of his words. "Luke, you're being ridiculous,"

"He's been obsessed with you since he knew what girls were," he snorts. "He used to speak about you incessantly even when we were back home. He'd beg our parents to let us stay longer during our visits and insisted on keeping you company when Mike and I would be marched off to learn foreign politics."

"We were children, Luke. James and I weren't allowed into those meetings, we didn't learn those things because we were the spares."

"He told me once," Luke stares off into the distance, breaking our eye contact. "He told me one day he'd marry you."

My heart leaps but my body remains frozen.

"And how could he not want to? He wasn't the only one who was in love with you and your sunshine smile and the way you made me never once feel alone despite being on the other side of the world. I knew I wanted you, I guess at the time I didn't care if I had to step on my brother's heart to get it."

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