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He stared at her, the implications of her cried out affirmation boggling his mind.
She’d truly thought holding on to her memories and to his good opinion of her more important than escaping her enslavement, or even preserving her life.
Being unable to reach into the past to make her realize that he would have forgiven her anything, that there’d been nothing to forgive, corroded his sanity. Her false belief had deprived him of the chance to protect her, save her.
He couldn’t even avenge her. Medvedev was already dead.
But, no. He’d been working to bring down The Organization—for himself, his brothers and all the unknown children who had been abused. But now, more than ever, he would destroy it on her behalf. His vengeance would now know no bounds. He would wreak unimaginable pain on everyone who’d had a hand in a single moment of her suffering. And when she hadn’t told him the worst parts yet... Though he no longer knew if he could withstand hearing them.
But he would, no matter what it did to him. He had to relieve her of all of her burdens, in every way he could.
A distant look came into her eyes. “But all my precautions were in vain. When you called me that last time, the moment I heard your voice I knew you’d found me out. I knew it was the end and I wasn’t ready. I would have never been ready. Everything I feared came to pass. You sounded as I always dreaded—angry and disillusioned and disgusted. I was only grateful I didn’t see all that on your face. And there was only one thing I could do. Make it all worse.”
She looked into his eyes with everything she was on display for the first time. And it was beyond his imagining.
“I wanted to disappear,” she said. “Make it impossible for Medvedev to find me. I also wanted to help others in my same situation, but I knew our collective freedoms would cost a huge amount of money. So I blackmailed you for it. That also served to end everything between us on the worst note possible.
“But before I could leave the country, Medvedev walked into the hotel room where I was under a false name. He was shrewd enough to sense I’d make a run for it. I told him I just wanted to escape The Organization, that I thought he wouldn’t come through for me since I only had proof you weren’t his agent. But he was convinced I had proof you were, even deducted I’d blackmailed you myself, though he assigned me purely mercenary motives for that. He said once I gave him the info, he wouldn’t only extort you himself, but your partners, too, whom he was certain were the other operatives who escaped, making this more lucrative than he’d ever thought.”
She paused to draw in a shuddering breath. “I failed to divert him, and he just knew everything. I knew he’d turn your hard-won freedom into a new prison, would end up turning you over to The Organization to redeem himself. The one card I had left was that he needed solid info, and I wouldn’t give it to him. At first, he still promised he’d keep his end of the bargain if I did mine. But I refused, told him he couldn’t do a thing without proof. And he started torturing me.”
Something fundamental charred inside him. Red-hot wrath against a dead man he couldn’t kill again almost ate through his arteries.
“I knew I wouldn’t walk out of that room alive, but I could still save you if I took him down with me. With the last strength left in me, I stabbed him with a stiletto I used as a hair clip. I know how to kill a man with one strike, but he was no ordinary man. Instead of going into instant shock, he was all over me. He almost killed me...before he succumbed.”
His whole body started shaking, on the verge of exploding. Scarlett had fought a monster like Medvedev and sustained near-fatal injuries...for him.
“I managed to stem my bleeding, to leave the hotel without being seen, to barely reach a secret medical center before I collapsed. It took them days to stabilize me.”
She stopped, and her silence stretched. His blood burned and congealed in his arteries each single second.
Then she talked again, as if in a fugue. “As soon as I was well enough, I started acquiring this new face and a new identity. I came back here believing I’d have the painful pleasure of seeing you from afar without any danger of you recognizing me. But you did recognize me, and now you’ve even found out everything I thought would forever remain hidden.”
Long minutes after she fell silent again, agonized beyond endurance, he choked out, “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you met me again? When there was no more danger to me? Why did you let me think the worst of you?”
Suddenly her eyes looked exactly as they had in the photo Numair had showed him. Lifeless, hopeless. “Because there was no point. I came here thinking you’d long forgotten me. Then you recognized me and offered me this arrangement, and I knew I was just passing through your life. I only wanted to have this time with you before I moved on. I knew you’d go on to have the life you worked so hard to establish and you’d never think of me again. And I didn’t want you to. I wanted to give you the closure I deprived you of the first time.”
“I didn’t want closure, Scarlett.” He gripped her face, his hands shaking, needing her to know every single thing he’d felt all these years. “I lived all these years going insane for an explanation, this explanation. I was unable to come to terms with the discrepancy between what I felt with you, from you, and what it had seemed to be. I’ve been unable to have any kind of intimacy again.”
“You mean you didn’t...?” A tiny flame leaped in her eyes before it was immediately extinguished.
He crushed her in his arms, his heart convulsing at the despondence in her eyes. She’d never even considered it was possible for him to feel the same for her as she felt for him.
Needing to make her believe he’d always been hers, to erase every terrible moment she’d ever lived, he raised her face to his and held her eyes. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was yearning for the only woman I ever wanted, and it was excruciating because I thought you were a lie. But not only have you always been real and everything I ever craved and more, you protected me and my brothers from exposure. You saved our lives. And it almost cost you your own.”
* * *
It cost me something more precious to me than my life.
Scarlett barely caught back the cry.
She couldn’t let him know that. Not that. But she couldn’t let him make it sound as if what she’d done had been a sacrifice. Giving him up had been that. Protecting him with her life had been a privilege.
She tried to wave his gratitude away, but he persisted.
&n
bsp; “You must accept your dues. And you will have the gratitude and lifelong allegiance of my brothers, too. Yes, my partners in Black Castle Enterprises are all The Organization’s escapees. We formed a brotherhood within our prison, swore a blood oath to escape, become unstoppable and bring down The Organization and anyone associated with it. We’re going through the list from the outside in, and from bottom to top in such convoluted ways, they wouldn’t know what hit them before they’re destroyed.” Suddenly he frowned, as if remembering something. “What happened to the people you wanted to help?”
