Page 13 of Born in Sin (Phoenix #3)

Chapter Seven

VIRAT

My place please.

That was all Virat had texted his friends so when he heard the code being input at the front door, he hurried over to open it before they strode in like they normally did.

If ever there was a moment that was surreal, this was it. He opened the door to Ishaan and Amay, Celi sitting on his couch, a glass of sparkling water in her hand.

“Do you know you have an angry giant standing outside and glaring at your front door?” Ishaan asked the minute he walked in.

Virat didn’t bother with an answer. He saw his friends glance over his shoulder at her and then back at him. Amay’s eyebrows shot up and Ishaan’s comical double take would have been funny if the situation hadn’t been so crazy.

“Wow,” Ishaan murmured. “I just asked you to call her. You overachiever, you!”

“Shut up, Ish.” Amay gave him a shove from behind and stepped into the room. They walked back towards where she sat, staring down at her phone.

“Celina!” Ishaan threw his arms open wide. “So good to see you!”

Her chilly stare froze his boisterous greeting in a second and he dropped his hands, realizing the hug was never coming. Virat stifled a smile at his stunned expression. Amay stepped smoothly into the breach.

“Hi Celina. Hope you’re well?”

She nodded. “As well as I can be given the circumstances.”

“Ahh yes, the circumstances,” Ishaan added awkwardly. For once in his life, he didn’t seem to have anything cheeky to add to the conversation.

“Sit.” Virat shoved him into a chair, and he collapsed into it without another word. Amay sat down on the couch facing Celina. “Celina has an idea for handling the Dusty Devils. I’m going to let her walk us through it.”

She sat forward, her glorious hair falling in unruly waves around that perfect face, her thin cream coloured, cashmere sweater falling in loose folds over her tight jeans. She looked like every man’s dream.

And she was, but she’d been his dream long before their world had turned into a nightmare. He wanted that time with her back with an intensity that crawled through his gut and into his very soul itself. And it was never going to happen.

“I’m going to use a burner phone to send them, specifically Majid, messages, little tidbits of things that happened that night. It will have them on edge and push them off the cliff of reason. Hopefully it pushes them to make mistakes.”

“Mistakes?”

“Those guys are loose cannons just waiting to go off,” she said softly.

“We all know that. We just need to light the taper. It will drive them insane to have a victim from their past step out of the dark and come for them. Their victims are meant to cower under their beds, not extend their middle fingers in their direction.”

“They’ll just assume that the messages are coming from one of us.” Amay frowned, his brain puzzling away at it.

“They won’t.” She leaned back, inhaled deeply. “There are things about that night that no one but I would know.”

Virat’s heart bled a little more, this cut going deeper than the rest. His hands clenched into fists and he shoved them into his pockets so he couldn’t reach for her.

“They’ll come for you,” Ishaan said, his gaze on her.

“They’ll come for Celina,” she corrected him. “But they won’t find her. They don’t know that I’m her. If they’d known, they would have come for me by now.”

No, they wouldn’t have. Virat wouldn’t have let them. He’d been tracking that very move every second of the years that had passed since that horrific night. The minute he’d have gotten the slightest inkling that they were on her trail, he’d have been there to block it.

He hadn’t saved her once, but he was damned if he wouldn’t do it, every single time since, in this lifetime and all the ones that come after it.

“What’s the end goal?” he asked now, drawing her gaze to him. Those wide, dark eyes rested on him, pain so old it felt like it seeped into their very bones, shining out of them.

“Ishaan’s right. The minute I push them off the edge, they’ll come for Celina. Like they did the last time. This time, Celina is going to be ready for them.”

“We set the stage, and they dance on it,” Virat murmured, his pulse doing an erratic tap dance at the thought. “We already have a sting in place.”

“There’s no harm in coming at them from different angles,” Ishaan said. “It makes it harder for them to focus on any one thing and invariably leads to them fucking up.”

“Your mother still lives with you,” Virat reminded her. “If they can track her, they can find you.”

“My mother changed her surname the minute my father divorced her. It’s a loose thread I agree, but not an obvious one. And,” Celina hesitated. “She’s aged. I’ll take the chance.”

“We can’t risk your career, your life!” Virat looked at her, his gaze begging her to understand. All of it, everything he’d done, everything she’d struggled for, what was it for, if it all imploded now?

“I believe that’s my decision to make,” she said quietly, not looking away from him.

“It’s not worth it, Celi.”

“It’s worth it to me,” she flared, her control and composure slipping. “I’m going to do this, with or without you.”

“We can try something else,” he said desperately. “Anything else.”

“Have you not already tried everything there is to try?” she demanded. “You wouldn’t have come to me if you hadn’t been failing at everything.”

Failing.

The word landed like a grenade. Virat struggled to keep his roiling emotions in check.

“Celi, please?”

“Are you with me or not, Vir? That’s all I need to know.”

Her calling him Vir was what unlocked the floodgates on his emotions. He shut his eyes and shook his head. Fuck his life.

“With you,” he said, his voice sounding scraped raw. “I am always with you.”