“I don’t want to,” I whisper.
“I thought you came for the truth. Tonight,” he says, throwing out his arms, “I am an open book. Ask me my truth, milaya. I dare you to.”
“I’m not your confessor,” I answer, swinging awayI suddenly wish I was anywhere but here.
“But you’ll listen anyway.” Because then his fingers are curling around my upper arm. I didn’t even hear him move over the hammering of my heart. “Because I did it for you.”
The animal inside me seems to recognize his meaning, even if my brain refuses to make sense of them.
“I punished him.”
“You—you broke his legs.”
“Perhaps I wouldn’t have if his email had been sincere.”
“You saw it?”
“Let’s just say he wrote it with supervision. The idiot didn’t realize it might’ve been his ticket to redemption. But he couldn’t even do that properly.” I pull against his hold on my arm when his grip tightens, and he pulls me closer. “It’s not easy to break a man’s legs with only a hammer, not that I blame Alexander for his lack of experience in his choice of tools. It would’ve been much easier if he’d said a wrist or an arm. Infinitely easier if he’d said he’d shoot him.”
“Let me go, Niko.”
“No, apology or not, it wouldn’t have saved him because when I dragged him out of his house, do you know what he was watching? Porn. The homemade kind. He’d been drugging women for years—women at university. Schoolgirls, drinking underage in Oxford pubs. You could’ve been a part of his collection. It might’ve been your face on the screen, your unconscious body he violated again and again.”
“So you killed him?” I whisper.
“It wouldn’t be the last time I killed in your name.”
44
Van
She looks truly horrified but not afraid as I cradle her face in my hands.
“No, Niko. Please don’t say that. You didn’t kill him for me. That’s not true.”
“Straight to the heart.” My thumbs stroke her pale cheekbones. “You’re right, of course. I killed him because he touched what wasn’t his.”
“I’m not a possession. I don’t belong to you.”
My smile feels sad as I shake my head. “You can’t deny it, Isla. For fifteen years, I have loved you, and now you love me back. I am yours, and you are mine.”
“Are you insane?” Her wide eyes are pleading. She just doesn’t get it yet. “Don’t you remember what happened in this room? How was that love? How could you bring me here and expect that of me?”
“It gave what I expected, what I planned. You did what I needed you to do. I had to get you out of London. I needed you safe. What I didn’t expect was for you to marry someone else.” Her face still in my hands, I press my lips to her head as though I could impart the rest of my tale this way. “You didn’t mourn for very long, did you, darling?”
“You killed us,” she whispers. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing,” I whisper, pulling back. “At least while I tell you the rest.”
Her mouth works silently as though she can’t make sense of her own thoughts. I take her hand, moving us past the chairs and the fireplace, past the lies I’d painted for her that night, lies that forced her away. At my desk, I slide my forearm across the top and watch as laptop, papers, and pens go tumbling to the floor. I don’t give a fuck.
“Niko, please.”
Ignoring her protests, I put my hands on her waist, lifting her to the edge and grabbing her hands as I drop to my chair. My legs bracket hers, the silk sliding from one thigh then the other, exposing the tanned length of her legs.
“I wanted you from the moment I set eyes on you,” I begin. “Wet-haired and desperately wiggling, your breath puffs of cold air in that bedroom. Then I found out who you were, and I knew it could never be.”
“Yes, I know.” Her voice is terse. “Because of my brother.”
“Fuck your brother. I sacrificed more than friends to be with you. To love you. But I couldn’t have you, not without putting you in danger.”
“What danger? Danger how?”
This was always going to be a problem, I think with a sigh. Isla is as good as she is golden in the lambent light. Her lashes painted dark, her denim eyes so piercing, it’s like they can see through me. But I know that’s not true, or else she would’ve realized long ago that I loved her. And she would’ve run anyway because she would’ve also seen my darkness.
“My uncle, he raised me after my parents were killed in a car crash. Konstantin Vanyin was the most powerful Russian in Europe. Wealthier than Croesus, more wicked than Caligula.”
“Was? But everyone speaks of your uncle as still being an important man.”