“I love you,” he whispered between jagged breaths.
And I loved him. Completely. Utterly. Unmistakably.
I would never look back.
Tori
Chapter 26
“Iwant to tell you about Anja,” Stefan said.
We were stretched out in bed together, and my head was heavy against his chest, where I’d been listening to his racing heartbeat slow back down to its normal pace.
“You mean Irina?” I asked.
At last I could breathe easier. He was finally going to tell me what he’d done for her. What she’d meant by the message she had asked me to deliver to him the other day at the café.
“No,” he said. “Anja. Anja Borjan.”
Stefan’s hand was in my hair, his other arm wrapped around my waist, keeping me close.
Confused, I raised my head and looked up at him. I expected him to be half asleep after the marathon sex we’d just had, maybe to the point of being mixed up regarding the woman he was telling me about. But he was wide awake, his green eyes focused intently on the ceiling.
“Okay,” I said softly. I couldn’t help fearing the worst. “What do you want to tell me about her?”
Whatever it was, we’d get through it. If he was making the effort to be honest with me, it meant he wanted us to work out. To be together, despite anything that had happened in the past.
He didn’t say anything for a long time and I started to worry that he’d changed his mind. That he was going to return to the quiet, closed off version of himself that I had lived with for so long. At last, he let out a long sigh and looked down at me.
“Who is Anja?” I asked, keeping my voice gentle and accepting.
“She’s a woman…from my past,” he said.
I nodded, feeling relieved. This wasn’t his mistress. It was someone from a long time ago. But clearly someone that had a hold on him, still. Someone who meant something to him.
“You can talk about her,” I urged him. “I’m listening.”
I wanted him to be honest with me. Open with me. I wanted to know all his secrets, even if they were hurtful or dangerous. It wasn’t like I expected him to have never loved anyone else.
“I knew her when I was younger,” he went on. “I was a teenager. We met just before I turned eighteen.”
Thinking back, I remembered what Emzee had told me. About how different Stefan had been in high school. How she thought something had happened to him to make him change. Was this woman Anja the reason for the way he was now? Hard, controlling, fiercely guarded to the point of cageyness? I propped myself up on my elbow, rolling to my side, and placed a hand over his heart. I could tell he was struggling for the right words, but that he wanted to keep talking.
“How did you two meet?” I asked.
“She was one of KZM’s models,” he confessed. “I met her at a show in Paris. I knew that she was working for my father, the way all the models work for him. The…jobs on the side.”
“Sure,” I murmured, letting him know I was following his words without judging.
“You have to understand—I thought, back then, that they were doing it because they wanted to. I had no idea they were being forced. I didn’t judge them for it, but I never stopped to think—I just assumed it was another job to them. Another way to make money.”
He shook his head, obviously angry at his naïveté.
“You were young,” I said, soothingly.
“I had my head up my own ass,” he scoffed. “And I wasn’t an innocent seventeen, either. I should have known.”
I felt a twinge of sympathy for a seventeen-year-old Stefan. It must have been a terrible thing for him to discover.
