Chapter 20: You murdered my husband!

Akari was sitting by the window in her room, gazing out at the stars. She was cold, like she had been since she woke up in this room several days before, and she couldn’t seem to get warm, no matter how many blankets she piled on. She had a woolen one wrapped around her shoulders now, but felt no warmth from it. She didn’t feel much of anything really, other than a dull ache in her head that didn’t seem to go away, which according to her doctors was a result of the concussion. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel anything emotionally. Not if she could help it. If Nikolai was dead, then… But she wouldn’t allow herself to go there, even in her own mind. If she didn’t think about it, it wasn’t real and that was all that mattered, at least for now.

The one thing that kept running through her mind over and over on constant replay was that she’d never told Nikolai that she loved him. She’d never told him how her feelings had changed toward him since that first time she saw him in her father’