My throat tightens, trapping air inside my lungs. I believe him. How could I not? He’s never lied to me, never tried to hide his feelings. From the very beginning, I’ve known the depths of his obsession with me, and while it used to scare me, it’s now perversely reassuring.
For as long as we’re both alive.
Something clicks for me, like a light flipping on, cutting through the fog of shock and post-sex daze. “Peter…” My voice shakes as I reach over to capture his hand between my palms. “Did you do it for me?”
He cocks his head, gray eyes puzzled. “Do what, ptichka?”
“This favor for Esguerra so he’d take you off the wanted lists… that thing that kept you away for so long.” Squeezing his hand, I bring it up to my chest, where a peculiar tightness constricts my pounding heart. “Am I the reason? Did you do it so you could be here with me?”
He frowns, covering my clasped palms with his other hand. “Of course, ptichka. Isn’t this what you wanted? A life where I’m not a fugitive, where we could be together without you losing your family and your career?”
I stare up at him, finally comprehending the enormity of what he’s done. It is what I wanted, what I’ve been longing for in the deepest recesses of my heart. It’s my darkest, most shameful fantasy—an actual life with my tormentor—and he’s made it a reality.
He’s done the impossible, pulled God knows how many strings—and all for me.
The steam filling the bathroom is making my eyes burn, and the vise around my heart squeezes tighter.
Peter loves me.
Really, truly loves me.
It’s no longer theoretical, what he’d do for me.
It’s real. He’s done it.
“Isn’t this what you wanted, Sara?” he repeats, frown deepening, and I find myself nodding like a marionette, still unable to speak.
“Good.” He gently extricates his hand from my grip and turns sideways, so that I’m under the water spray. Picking up my shampoo, he pours it into his palm and starts massaging it into my scalp, as though that’s what one does after that kind of revelation.
As though that’s all there is to say.
And maybe that’s true. Maybe we should revisit this conversation when I don’t feel so blindsided, so overwhelmed by his sudden return and all that’s bound to go along with it. Because I still don’t know what to say to him, how to explain the way I feel.
How to tell him that though I’m overjoyed to have him here, I’m terrified in equal measures.
He washes my hair thoroughly, his strong fingers massaging my scalp and neck, and then he applies conditioner and lets it sit while he washes the rest of me, his soapy, callused hands sliding all over my body, stroking and caressing my skin with just the right amount of tenderness and roughness.
It feels amazing, like the most exquisite spa treatment, and when he finally rinses the soap off me, I pick up the body wash and do the same to him, enjoying the feel of his sleek, hair-roughened skin as I run my hands over his large, hard-muscled body.
He’s always taken care of me, pampered me like a princess, but I’ve never done it for him, I realize. Returning my tormentor’s affection has always felt like a betrayal of George and everything else that mattered, and while I couldn’t help myself in bed, I kept myself aloof at other times, accepting Peter’s ministrations but never reciprocating them.
I still feel some of that guilt, that sense of wrongness, but it’s no longer the suffocating pressure it once was. As the months passed and the shock of George’s violent death faded, I’ve been able to think about it more rationally, to analyze the events from a different perspective.
For one thing, George wasn’t truly alive when Peter put a bullet in his head. He’d been in a coma for eighteen months, and given the extent of damage to his brain, there’d been almost no chance he’d ever emerge from it. At some point, I would’ve had to make the excruciating decision to take him off life support—something I’d been avoiding thinking about, especially since I’d been convinced that George’s accident was partially my fault.
In a way, Peter took that awful responsibility from me—something I’ve only recently let myself consider.
There’s also the fact that George betrayed me. The drinking that ruined our marriage was bad enough, but all along, he’d also led a double life, had a career as a spy that I knew nothing about. It’s taken me all this time to absorb it fully, but I now see George’s actions for the gross betrayal that they were, and the love I thought I felt for him now seems like a chimera.
Not that any of this justifies Peter’s actions—not by a long stretch. He’s still the amoral assassin who’s killed more people than I can wrap my mind around, still the man who once tortured, stalked, and kidnapped me. But now he’s also the man who loves me, who’s demonstrated in the clearest way possible that I matter to him.