She went back to glaring. “I can’t win no matter what I offer to do. I told you the truth. My name really is Ashe Bronte Mostafa.”
“And you know Mostafa is your true surname.” He made it a statement.
Faint color slid up her neck to stain her face. She nodded. “Yes. I know that’s my real name. My father didn’t like us to use it. They both loved Bronte poems. I know Charlotte Bronte was famous for her novels, but she did write poetry. She, along with her sisters, wrote poems my parents particularly liked.”
He particularly liked them as well. “What was their favorite?”
She raised her chin the slightest bit, as if she thought he was challenging her. “Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Life.’ They often read that one to me.”
He was familiar with it, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. She had managed, in a very short period of time, to slip under his guard and get inside him. There was something very valiant about her. He straightened slowly, a thought coming to him. It was farfetched and completely ridiculous, but sometimes one had to consider the ridiculous.
“Did your father ever talk about the messenger? Or a messenger? Did you ever hear him use those words?”
She nodded. “Once, just after I moved out. I had gone to visit them, and they weren’t staying in the cabin. I tracked them into the hills. I knew their favorite camping spots, so even when their tracks disappeared into water, I knew where I could find them. Dad said they’d be traveling in the mountains for a few months but staying relatively close just in case I needed them.” She finished the water off and set the glass aside on the nightstand.
“Needed them for what?”
“He told me to look out for a man. A stranger. One calling himself Apostol. He said he was the messenger. I said messenger for what? Of what? He never answered me. He just looked at my mother and both shook their heads.”
“He is the messenger of death,” Timur supplied. “At least that’s what his role is supposed to be. Most likely, he caught up with your parents.”
“This messenger killed them? He tortured and then killed them?”
“I doubt if he did the actual killing. He found them, delivered the message so they would know they were living on borrowed time, and then the actual elimination team was brought in.”
“Is that what you are?” She looked him straight in the eye. “Are you the elimination team? Is that why you’re here?”
He didn’t take his eyes from hers and, damn him to hell, he wasn’t going to lie. “That’s who I am right this minute, yes. I came here to find the truth, and if you were a threat to either Evangeline or Fyodor, damn straight I’d end you in a heartbeat.” And go the rest of his life without a woman, because he knew she was the one and it had very little to do with his leopard driving him.
Her long lashes swept down and then back up. He found himself looking at her cat, and then the lashes did another sweep and he was looking at her. There was nothing there to suggest she found him despicable as he expected.
“If I knew someone had threatened my parents, I would have killed them.”
He hadn’t expected acceptance. He found himself going still inside. Feeling hope. Trying to squash it down so he wouldn’t be bitterly disappointed. He’d been disappointed all his life. He had learned not to want anything. To feel anything. He had known there would be no home for him. No loving family no matter if he dreamt of that. That dream had been destroyed before it could ever get off the ground.
First his father made certain his leopard was a killer by beating him so severely and repeatedly that it forced the young cat to emerge in an effort to defend the boy. Then there were the training sessions, vicious ones, where men beat him with clubs to bring out his savage nature. His father drilled it into Timur that women were only to be used and then cast aside. He did that in a brutal way as well, wanting to harden his son. He raped and then beat women to death in front of him and then ended the lessons with the cruel murder of Timur’s own mother.
“You make me believe there is good in the world after all,” he said. Even giving her that felt like giving too much. She made him feel vulnerable when he couldn’t afford to be. He was the one who kept everyone else safe. He couldn’t afford to feel too much.
“I don’t know why. I did come here under false pretenses. I’ll tell Evangeline tomorrow.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to see this thing through. Until I know what’s going on, I want you where I can see you at all times.”