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back his protective armour and had revealed his true nature. When he’d walked away from me, yet had set into motion all the various little kindnesses that would ease my return back to my home country, he’d demonstrated that I could trust him.
    Blood wasn’t always thicker than water. Sometimes, we weren’t defined by our families. We were defined by who we chose to become.
    Yet while the fact that he was related to Dylan didn’t matter, what did matter was the way he’d sent me away. Even now, even after almost eighteen months of therapy, anger still prickled at me about that last day in Paris. Had he sent me away because he couldn’t forgive me for killing his father, I would have understood. Had he sent me away because he was bored by me, it would have been devastating, but I would have dealt with it.
    No, he’d sent me away because it was better for me. And that still infuriated me.
    I was an adult. A somewhat damaged adult, but an adult nonetheless. If Alexander wanted to highlight his difference from Dylan, removing my ability to make decisions about my own future was not exactly the best way to go about it. He had had no right to make that choice for me.
    Even as I fumed about this, both in private and in many vocal sessions with Dr. Wilson, I was aware that these two wrongs could not be evaluated on the same scale. What Dylan had done to me was far, far worse.
    I’d vacillated for months about returning to Paris. I craved Alexander and our time in his playroom, but I could not be Alexander’s submissive again until I was confident that the playroom would be the only room in the house where choices would be taken away from me. I’d been a slave in a cell in Nigeria. Paris was prettier, but if I returned, I wanted it to be clear that I wasn’t about to return to a more gilded cage, one where my decisions would still be made for me.
    The long and short of it was that there was going to be some yelling. At least, I hoped there would be yelling. If he was with someone else, I wouldn’t need to give vent to my anger. I’d flushed it out of my system during the year and a half of therapy. The only reason to bring it up was to point out to Alexander that I was not okay with him making choices for my own good .
    I was paying no conscious attention to my surroundings, but my subconscious was always alert. So when the man materialized next to me, I wasn’t entirely surprised. There was still a moment of pure fear, before the adrenaline came rushing in. My memories of being abducted in Beechwood Mall were never going to recede. Though I was now better able to defend myself, my first instinctive response would always be terror.
    “ Bonsoir , Ellie.” The man’s voice stopped me in my tracks, cutting off my planned attack at the pass. I recognized this voice. I pivoted my head to confirm my suspicions and I was indeed correct. This was Jean-Luc, the man who headed up Alexander’s security. He’d been there in Hanoi. He’d got Alexander and myself out of Vietnam after I killed Dylan.  
    “Jean-Luc.” My voice was tight with tension. “To what do I owe the honour?”
    He ignored my question and moved closer to me until his shoulders touched mine. When he spoke, his voice was low. “You aren’t being watched right now,” he said. “But we must still move quickly.”
    “Except by your guards, you mean?” I wondered if Jean-Luc thought I was stupid. I’d spotted the guards the first day they’d followed me. A week of discrete probing, and I’d learned that their paychecks came from Alexander.
    A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “You know about them?”
    “I’m not a fool and Alexander doesn’t strike me as someone who turns his back on people.”
    “He isn’t,” Jean-Luc agreed. He kept his head down and the hood on his sweatshirt was drawn up. “But the guards aren’t his doing, they are mine.”
    I ignored the sharp stab of pain that resulted from Jean-Luc’s words. Maybe Alexander