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“Wait,” he said, running after her and grabbing her arm. “I’m trying to be a gentleman here. I know you don’t trust me, and if what we did that night is part of it, I want you to know that I’m sorry.”
She scrunched her eyes, her lips drew tightly together, and she wrenched her arm from his grasp.
“Fuck you,” she spat before walking away from him a second time.
—:—
If he followed her, he would live to regret it. Maybe. As mad as she was, she just might kill him. They shouldn’t have had sex? How awesome that she lost her virginity at the ripe old age of thirty to a man who wishes they hadn’t done it. If she’d known then what she knew now, she could’ve had sex with anyone. It would’ve mattered just as much as it had with Gunner—which wasn’t at all.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she heard him say. He was right behind her, but she kept walking. “Zaryana.”
Raketa spun around on him. “Don’t you call me that. Not ever again. Do you understand?” She used the same condescending voice he had with her. Or had he? It didn’t matter. She turned back around to continue her march to his house.
“Wait,” he said, grabbing her arm again, more firmly than before, knowing she’d try to pull away from him. He held her tightly enough that he could turn her around and encircle her in his arms.
“Let me go. I don’t want this,” she said, refusing to look at his stupid, smug, beautiful face or his stupid green eyes that made her melt.
“First, I will not ever call you that again, although I wish I understood why you don’t want me to; it’s a beautiful name. Second, as I said, I was trying to be a gentleman. I was apologizing.”
“Etmez.”
The look on Gunner’s face made her realize her mistake. She’d spoken in Azeri, not Russian.
“Release me.”
Gunner shook his head. “Were you his lover?”
Raketa pushed at him with all her might, and he let go. “Fuck you,” she spat again, this time running toward the woods.
Jesus. Is that what he thought, that she’d had sex with that disgusting piece of shit not worthy to be called a human being? The idea of it made her want to puke.
When she got to the water’s edge, she bent over and put her hands on her knees. Her stomach was empty of food, but she expelled the bile that rose in her throat. Too soon she felt Gunner’s hand on her back.
“Can’t you leave me alone? Please, just leave me alone,” she cried.
“No. I can’t, and not for the reason you think.”
“There needs to be no reason for you not to leave a woman alone who asks it of you.” Raketa hated the sound of her voice. She was upset and when she was, her accent grew stronger and it was harder for her to communicate the nuances of the English language. She hated her accent sometimes as much as she hated her name.
Instead of walking away, Gunner swept her into his arms.
“What are you doing? Put me down,” she shouted, punching at his chest.
“We’re going to talk, and you can stop with the bad language; it has no effect on me. I don’t talk to you that way.”
“You are not my superior. You don’t tell me how to speak. You are not my fath—”
—:—
Gunner almost dropped her with his sudden realization of who Makar Petrov was to her when she abruptly didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, he set her on her feet but kept his arm tightly around her.
“He’s your father.”
He’d seen the look on her face before. Not on hers specifically, but the look of utter despair, of pain too heavy to bear, of its concession, he’d seen many times. He had no words to take away what she was feeling right now, pain that he had handed to her.
“Tell me about him.”
Raketa closed her eyes, and a look of calm rolled from her forehead down her face. He recognized that too. She’d been trained to not show a reaction of any kind, and while she was still emotional—she had to be—she’d reined herself in.
