She nodded, and somehow the confirmation that someone understood was a greater comfort than all the denials in the world. Rafe could make excuses. He could take the blame or put the blame on Dima and his men since they’d been the ones to plant the bomb that had killed her. But it didn’t change the fact that it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for me and my choices.
“But your father and grandmother are alive. That could easily change if Rafael were to give Pavel any indication that he cares for either of them,” she said, confirming the words Rafe had said about Odina.
He could only protect me, in the end.
“He really isn’t going to do anything to get my sister back, is he?” I asked, and the silence of Joaquin and Hugo as they surrounded me served as confirmation enough.
Still, Anna answered with the brutal honesty I had already begun to realize was just a part of her. “Sweetheart, my impression of your sister through your husband’s eyes? Pavel did him a favor. Rafael Ibarra is not the kind of man to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
I nodded, swallowing past the tightness in my throat.
Another life, another stain on my soul. At some point, I would have to confront the fact that I wasn’t the innocent girl who had bad things happen to her.
There was something inside of me that attracted those bad things, that drew men like Rafael into my life.
There was something evil inside me, something I’d worked to suppress my entire life, but good things didn’t come to those who resisted temptation.
Instead, it came to those who took what they wanted in fire and blood.