He lifted his eyes to hers, and she could see he'd left off the colored contacts he normally wore. He looked utterly ravaged. Gutted. "I left you the code, Blythe. I left you hundreds of messages. You never once reached out to me. I thought . . ." He closed his eyes.
Her heart clenched hard in her chest. He wasn't lying to her. Right in that moment it would be impossible for him to lie and her to not see it, Prakenskii or not. Trained or not. No one was this good of an actor. Something had gone terribly wrong.
Her heart leapt. Sang. She shut it down fast. She didn't need or want hope, but the idea that he hadn't simply abandoned her was there whether she wanted it or not.
"I'm going to make you a cup of tea." The universal antidote for everything with her sisters. It gave one time to think, and she needed to. She needed to find balance. To puzzle things out. She needed not to be so close to him.
"Blythe, don't go yet." He refused to let her go even when she stepped back again, putting pressure on his arms. If anything, he tightened his hold. "I need you right now."
She had needed him so many times over the years, but especially when she lost their daughter. For one terrible moment, bitterness welled up and she wanted to strike out at him, hurt him, but there was no hurting him more than he already was feeling. She breathed away the emotion and stood still in his arms, letting him lean into her.
"I'm sorry for not being with you." His voice was muffled against her breast.
She felt the warmth of his breath right through her tank top. Her heart reacted to having him close to her. Remembering what it was like to feel safe with him. Not alone.
"I would have come. I would have come to you if I'd known you were pregnant."
His voice suddenly had gone from gravelly with sorrow to edged with anger. Abruptly, he put her aside and stood up. She was tall but he loomed over her, a giant oak of a man with broad shoulders and ropes of muscle. He looked intimidating and definitely angry. She knew that feeling as well. The horrible, bright need to strike out.
He paced away from her, across the room, his hands in two tight fists. "I was out trying to save other people's children. All those fucking years, Blythe. Risking our marriage, risking us. For what? What the fuck did I accomplish? In the end I lost my daughter. Everything has been taken from me. Everything."
He hit the wall hard with his closed fist. "All those children. They killed them, one by one. So damn many. Little girls. Little boys. But first they let the pedophiles loose on them. God, baby, they're sick fucks. I couldn't save them either." He punctuated each sentence with another solid blow to the wall. His voice was strangled, anger and sorrow mixing until her throat burned all over again because his was.
She didn't know if he was aware he had shifted from present to past, talking about things she didn't know. She didn't care about the wall and the fact that he was destroying it. She cared about the fact that his knuckles were torn and bleeding and he showed no signs of stopping. She was a little afraid of him, not that she thought he'd hit her, or do anything to hurt her, but this man wasn't one she knew.
"Stop." She kept her voice soft. Soothing. She didn't know who he was talking about or what he'd seen, but it had been bad. Really, really bad. She knew because she felt that too.
"Don't. Just fucking don't play me that way." He bit out the command, anger stabbing at her.
"I'm not playing you, Viktor," she denied.
He swung around, blood dripping from his hands to the wood floor. His face was a mask of pain, not from the blows to the wall--she would bet anything he hadn't felt those--but from the terrible anguish in his heart. She knew what it felt like when one's heart and soul were ripped out.
"You are. Like you do with your sisters. The way you always did with your bitch of a mother. Keeping your voice low, taking on the pain, working overtime so everyone remains calm and happy. Being perfect so no one gets angry. I'm angry, baby, fucking pissed. If Sharon were standing in front of me right now, I'd kill her. Beat her to death. Strangle her. If I could revive her, I would, and then do it all over again."
His breath came in angry blasts. His eyes narrowed on her, the color a strange sheen of almost silver. His fists clenched and unclenched. He walked toward her and she forced herself to stand still, not turn and run like her shivering body wanted her to do. She knew that rage; she'd felt it herself. She might not have the exact violent tendencies, but when she woke in the hospital to find there was no hope for her daughter, she wanted to kill Sharon as well.
"Does that scare you?"
"Yes." She whispered the admission. It did scare her, because as much as she had wanted to kill Sharon, she never would have done it. She knew Viktor would have.
"Do I scare you?"
She nodded slowly, never taking her eyes from his. Sadly for her, she still wanted to hold him. To comfort him. He'd made that impossible with his blazing eyes, now molten mercury, and his low, whispered words that scared the hell out of her.
"Yes." She refused to step back. "This is the real you, isn't it? You're not the man you pretended to be."
"Don't even start that bullshit. You know what I gave you was genuine. Everything I could, in every way I could, I gave you the real me. This is real too. No one is perfect all the time, Blythe. No one."
In spite of her determination to be understanding, anger was beginning to stir, not a good thing when she had so much of it stored up. "Are you implying that I think I'm perfect?"
"I'm telling you that you need to get used to this side of me. I'm not going away. You're not going to a divorce attorney. We're going to work this out, and that means that you see all of me, not just the parts you want to see."
"That's not fair, Viktor. You never showed me this side of you."
"Bullshit. You felt it each time Ray's name was mentioned or after your mother called and made you cry."
She had. She had ignored the rage she'd known was inside of him, deep, where it was never going to go away. She'd ignored it because it scared her. She'd lived with violence as a child, and she didn't want to think she'd married a man capable of physical aggression. She'd pretended to herself that he was always calm and cool no matter what.
She swallowed the disappointment in herself and nodded. "You're right. I did. I didn't want to see it, but I did." She rubbed her hand down her face, suddenly exhausted. "I have to go downstairs. You need to wash up before you get an infection."
He reached out and shackled her wrist, tugging until she came up against his body. "You're not running away from me. I'm not losing you again. I lived in hell for five years, certain you didn't care enough to contact me even to tell me to go to hell. You lived in a worse hell thinking I didn't give a damn. We're not going to let her win."
"Her?" But she knew. Sharon had somehow managed to tear them apart. It had to be that. Viktor was so adamant that she could contact him. He couldn't fake his grief or the ferocity of his rage.
"Sharon." He spat out the name. Tugging her wrist, he took her with him into the bathroom. "You know she did this to us."
She was very grateful she liked space because Viktor took up lots of it. He seemed to suck up the air around them as he went to the sink. "You got a first aid kit?"
She nodded and reached around him to open the cabinet and pull out the small one she kept upstairs. The big one was downstairs where she could get to it fast if something happened to one of the children or her sisters. "Sit down." She indicated the bench in front of the very large bathtub.
Viktor did what she asked, and that made it easier for her to breathe. The rage was subsiding, and with that the grief it had been holding back rushed to the forefront again. It was impossible to stay angry with him when she felt that.
"You know, Viktor," she said softly as she spread triple antibiotic cream over his smashed knuckles, "I can't help who I am any more than you can help who you are. I feel other people's emotions. That isn't something I can turn off. It doesn't happen when I touch people; it happens when I get near them. You
walk into a room and I know how you're feeling. My nature, the empath in me, demands I do something about it. I'm not trying to be perfect. Believe me, I know I'm far from perfect."
She kept her head bent over his hands, fussing more than necessary so she wouldn't have to look at him. She knew he felt the faint tremor that ran through her body and the slight waver to her voice. He couldn't know how horrible she felt that she hadn't soothed Sharon that day, that she had turned her back, even knowing how vicious her mother could be. She was definitely far from perfect. Had she done the right thing her daughter might still be alive.
"Baby, look at me."
She couldn't. He would see tears burning behind her eyes. She didn't want him to think he'd put them there. "I can't yet. Let's just not say anything for a minute or two."
"I never thought for one minute you think you're perfect. I was being a dick. I can get like that. I'm going to let you know up front, I can be ugly when my temper gets loose." He was silent for a brief moment while she wrapped his knuckles with gauze. "I'm not good when I feel helpless. I fix things. Problems. Messes. I take care of business. It was what I was trained for, in a very ugly way, but the training is all I have. Knowing you needed me--the most important person in my life, and I let you down--that's bad enough, but that our daughter needed me--" He broke off abruptly.
She shifted back on her heels to look down at the raw anguish in his eyes. There was no telling him to leave. To go away. No talking divorce. That was beyond her ability. The only thing she could do was comfort him. Her palm shaped his face and she bent to rub her cheek over the top of his head. He had thick hair, a wild mane, black streaked with silver. She had always liked the silver in his hair and when she'd asked him about it, he had shrugged and said he'd had it from his teenage years.
Her Viktor. So torn. She would see weariness in his face. Lines of grief. She didn't know what happened to him, but if the stories his brothers told were anything to go by, it had been horrific. It was all there for her to see. He was too grief-stricken to hide it from her.
"Honey, everyone can look back and say what they should have done, but that's after, with full knowledge of what occurred." Direct from her many counseling sessions. She wished she could believe there wasn't guilt for either of them.
"I was coming back. I was, Blythe. I would never have left you."
"But you did." It slipped out before she could stop it and with it the hurt. The betrayal. Five long years of nights with no answers and a lost child. How did one recover from that? "You didn't come back, Viktor."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, a family trait many of his brothers had. She wondered if their daughter would have had it. "I left you a long letter. Very detailed. How to get in touch with me, the explanation for what I did. My entire history. All of it. I put my birth brothers at risk as well as my brothers and sisters from the school. I gave it all to you. I knew it was going to be bad dealing with Sharon, so I planned to slip back in a couple of days when the heat had died down from the police."
She held herself very still so she wouldn't shatter. A letter. He hadn't just left without an explanation. He'd at least left her a letter. That meant something in spite of her determination not to let him back under her skin. She'd all but worshipped him. She missed him every single day. She ran to get him out of her head. She'd tried to bury him with her daughter, but it hadn't worked. Nothing worked. She'd dated, on and off, but no one even remotely interested her.
She moistened suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue, trying not to hope there was an explanation for a five-year absence. She couldn't imagine what it could be, and she saw the woman sitting on the back of his bike. She had to keep perspective. Emotions were raw, and she was so alone all the time. Viktor had always, always been her only. If people had soul mates, he'd been hers.
"You didn't come," she murmured. "Whatever your intentions were, you didn't come."
"I called you two days after. I left four messages at your house. One of my brothers was in trouble. He'd taken a hit and it was bad. He needed medical care and someone to protect him while he mended."
She lifted her chin and looked him right in the eye. "Which brother?" Not a single one of the men she'd come to consider family had said a word about Viktor coming to help them. Not even Gavriil.
"We call him Absinthe. He's here with me if you want to talk to him. He survived, but it took a while. There was no one else, Blythe. He would have died. He was being hunted. We had to lie low because Sorbacov would have had both of us killed. As it was, the hit went out on Absinthe. It was a struggle to smuggle him out of the country and then find a safe place for him to recover."
She had no doubt that Absinthe or any of his other "brothers" would lie for him and look perfectly sincere. Still, she believed that ravaged look on his face. The stunned shock and anger, the grief welling up like a bottomless geyser, ready to consume both of them. She'd lost their daughter and she'd lost him. Still, there was no going back from five long years of emptiness and pain for either of them.
"What happened to him?" She had no idea why she asked. It only took her closer to the abyss. She knew he was the kind of man to sacrifice everything to help someone he cared about--loved. She might as well admit he loved these men he surrounded himself with.
She couldn't let Viktor back into her life. She held herself together by being alone, by trusting only the women who shared a violent past and had shown her she could live in the aftermath. She didn't want to know about his brothers or the woman on the back of his bike, especially if they were hurt in any way. She had too much empathy. Her gift demanded she help others and she couldn't stop herself.
"He was shot five times and left for dead by a band of men who kidnapped, raped and ransomed on a regular basis. They kidnapped the daughter of one of Sorbacov's friends while she was vacationing in South America. Absinthe managed to save her, but then dragged himself into a basement and called me. They were hunting him and he was running out of ammo. I had to get to him as fast as possible."
She hated that she could so easily see the man in her mind, bloody and hurting, waiting in the dark alone to die. Could she fault Viktor for rushing to save his friend? She would have in a heartbeat had it been someone she loved.
"How could he stay alive?" She couldn't imagine.
"You hate enough, baby, you can do anything."
She frowned. "Who do you hate that much?"
Viktor stood up so that she had to step back. He was too close. In spite of the spacious room, he took up too much of the air. Heat radiated off his body, warming her when she felt cold inside.
"Men and women who think they're entitled to fuck up everyone's lives."
It was the edge to his voice that sent icy fingers creeping down her spine. She looked up at his face. She was familiar with his eyes, so unusual, burning hot or cold. The line of his jaw and his nose that had clearly been broken more than once. Every scar on his body, and he had a lot of them.
"I don't really know you at all, do I?"
"You know me. At least one part of me, Blythe, the part no one else has ever had. If you'd read the letter you'd understand me."
"Well, I didn't. And you shouldn't have written me a letter, you should have talked to me. Face to face. After you saved your friend. Why didn't you come then?"
He sighed and ran his hand through his hair, so that the thick mass was more disheveled than ever. "I got the assignment to hunt Evan Shackler-Gratsos. He's the international president of the Swords and runs the largest human trafficking ring in the world. I had to go deep undercover if I was going to take that assignment, and really, when Sorbacov gives you a mission, you have no choice unless you want to be taken out. Still, I could have disappeared. I despise men like Shackler. They like hurting people. Children. Speaking of children . . ." He pulled a crumbled piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. "I want you to look into this kid and make certain she's doing okay. If not . . ." He waved his hand.
Bly
the frowned and opened the paper as she stepped around him. She needed to get out of the bathroom and back into her huge master bedroom. She was uncomfortable being in any room that had a bed with him, but it was better than inhaling him with every breath she took.
She glanced down at the paper. There was a single name. Darby Henessy. "Who is this?"
"The Swords had her and a few other girls in a training camp. We got them out. Called the local cops, and they took the girls. Most have homes, some are runaways and others just don't have anyone. They're kidnapped or lured in by other kids the Swords use, or promised jobs. She was a fighter. They gang rape these kids, beat the shit out of them and scare them so bad they'll do anything to keep from being hurt again. This one stood up to them. My guess is they would have sent her to one of his snuff ships."
Her stomach lurched. "You want me to find her and make certain she's all right? What did you want me to do if she isn't? She could be in the system already. Foster care, or a ward of the state."
"Then get her. Bring her here. Work your magic. She deserves to have a home with people who care about her."
Blythe sat down in one of the winged armchairs in front of the gas fireplace, because if she didn't sit, she might fall down. She felt a little faint. Viktor had come out of nowhere, telling her they were married and he wasn't going anywhere, heard about their daughter, destroyed her wall and now was asking her to bring a stranger into her home and take care of her.
"How old is this girl?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. She looked really young, but acted older. Her eyes were old. Anywhere from thirteen to seventeen. She wouldn't be of legal age or the chapter wouldn't have taken her. Young girls are more economical."
She flinched. She couldn't help it. It wasn't that she wasn't aware of what went on in the world--they had evidence of it right there on their farm. "Maxim and Airiana were on one of the Shackler-Gratsos ships. They rescued four children and brought them here. They're adopting them. One of their little sisters was killed on that ship. They're all very young. The oldest, Lucia, is fourteen. One is a boy."
"Pedophiles like both sexes, Blythe." Viktor took the chair opposite her, sprawling out, his long legs crossed at the ankles.