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My eyes never left the bandage on the side of my head, staring at it and remembering the way it felt to have Ryker's fingers take such delicate care of me as he cleaned the wound when we got home.
Like he wasn't a killer.
I knew the moment he came up behind me in the bathroom, even without looking at him. His presence was always tangible in the air, the menace and danger and absolute power that rolled off of him was something that I'd never been able to deny. I didn't know how I'd convinced myself he wasn't all that bad. That his crimes must have been less severe. That it would somehow be okay as long as he only killed other criminals who deserved it.
Everything I'd needed to see was right in front of me, I just hadn't been able to handle the truth.
I still couldn't handle the truth. I dropped my eyes to the sink, gripping the edge of the counter as I tried to focus on my breathing. Tried to let air into my lungs that burned for it when I felt like I was dying. Like my heart was being torn from my body. Because I'd fallen in love with a monster.
"You keep a hatchet in your Maserati," I said, and the flat tone to my voice grated against me, making my head pound.
"I don't like guns," Ryker said, and there wasn't a single hint of remorse in his voice. Nothing to show that he regretted killing two men, or anything even remotely close to it. He stepped up to my side, and his hand reached out to touch the edge of the bandage. The sudden movement made me flinch back, stumbling over my own feet as I tried to put distance between us. His blue eyes darkened, his face hardening into a cruel mask. He took a step toward me, his lips parting to reveal his straight teeth as he spoke so low, so quietly I might have thought it my imagination if it hadn't been for the intensity of his gaze on mine. "You do not ever flinch away from me," he growled.
He closed the gap, and I held my ground. I didn't flinch the second time, but I released a slight whimper as he peeled the bandage back to expose the wound. He studied it, his fingers gently prodding the bruising around the edges as if testing the severity. I didn't know why, since he had no intention of taking me to a hospital.
I had the distinct feeling it didn't bode well for me.
"Did you really kill your family?" I whispered, and I immediately regretted the question. I couldn't handle the answer, wouldn't survive knowing—
"Yes," he said, so simply as he studied me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think. "Shh, Tesoro," he murmured, his voice gentling with whatever he saw on my face. I still couldn't breathe, and it felt like he'd sucked all traces of life out of me with his confession. "Breathe, Sunshine," he ordered, tapping my chest as I finally heaved in a deep soul-wrecking breath.
His hand reached up, touching the pulse point on my throat and feeling it pound. Too quickly, too hard.
Too much.
Lifting me into his embrace, he brought me to the bedroom and deposited me on the bed, and the feeling of the soft sheets beneath me seemed to spur me into action. My limbs moved in a flurry of motion, struggling and shoving and kicking him off of me. "Still, Calla," he ordered. "Do not make me hold you down for this conversation." I froze immediately, hope surging with the word conversation.
I knew he'd want to punish me, as he always did, and that sex would be the answer. But there was time, time to think and find a way out of the situation. "My family," he breathed, and his eyes clenched shut. "Deserved everything they got."
I gasped when his eyes flung open, the blue of them seeming to shine even brighter than normal. "I wanted nothing to do with the family business," he scoffed. "My father and his friends had a penchant for children, and my father had the unique skill of training them to be obedient. He trained my brother and I to follow in his footsteps, and to do that he made us watch. My mother just let it happen. She didn’t stop any of it." Tears flooded my eyes, but they couldn't seem to fall.
I could only imagine the horror of being raised by a man who trained children for sexual servitude. "Ryker—"
"My brother was a willing participant by the time he turned fourteen. Lost his virginity to a girl in our basement, that he and my father had painstakingly trained. I was only eight at the time. So in the face of my brother's success, as my father put it, I was the continual disappointment. Especially when I'd yet to fuck any of them by my eighteenth birthday. I didn’t want to learn. I refused to train the kids they brought in. I had nightmares every night of the things they did in that basement. So, I ran. I just left. I didn't report what I'd seen, because I knew enough to know they would make me disappear before I could do something that stupid. I thought if I ran, they'd let me live my life in peace," he rasped, hanging his head in shame. "I was wrong and stupidly naïve. A year and a half later, my brother ran Lauren off the road and killed her and the baby when I refused my father's attempts to draw me back to the family business."
"I—" I didn't know what to say. What would I have done in that situation? I wanted to say that I'd have gone to the police, but having seen the power Matteo wielded over the Chief of Police, I understood with more clarity that it would have been pointless and dangerous. And the FBI offered no more help when a very powerful man, like a senator, were involved.
"After that happened, I came to the Bellandis. Matteo's father offered to help me if I agreed to work for him, so he trained me to fight. I'd already put on muscle mass since leaving home, so it was just a matter of teaching me to fight and torture and kill. I learned on the streets, and when I was ready, he gave me permission to kill them. He made it go away with the police, even if it was outside his territory. The Bellandi name reaches everywhere," Ryker explained. "So yes, Sunshine. I killed my family. I massacred my family, and if Franco Bellandi had allowed it, I'd have massacred all the men I knew who bought the kids my father trained."
"I'm so sorry for what you went through," I whispered, but I still couldn't move to embrace him. I felt frozen solid as I stared at him, and the horrors he must have seen at such a young age made me cry.
I wanted to comfort him, but I didn't know how to comfort something that powerful. That overwhelming.
There was nothing that could be said in the face of that kind of pain.
"You should have come to me and asked me after Jason showed you those pictures. Not let him drag you to his car and pick up the kids to leave me.” The sudden shift back to anger was startling. I'd known it would come, had known that there would be hell to pay if he caught me.
"I was in shock," I whispered, and it was true. I'd never decided to leave him. I'd never made any decision, but I'd known I needed time to figure it out.
"You left with another man!" he yelled, and I clenched my eyes shut to avoid the intense way he glared at me. “You should have fought harder.”
"It wasn't like that!" I protested. "I just needed to think, and nobody would let me think."
"You put yourself at risk. You put the kids at risk," he plowed on, as if he didn't care to hear anything I had to say. So lost in his rage, my voice went unheard.
"I was with a cop. I didn't think we would be in danger," I told him. "Who attacks a cop in the middle of the day?"
"Because you know nothing about this business," he said, reaching out a hand to stroke over my cheek. I winced, the proximity to my wound making it pulse with pain. "That is exactly why you stay with your fucking security and let me keep you safe. Can you take one goddamn second to think about what it was like for me to see that car, and fucking know you'd been inside it? The last accident I saw, I pulled my dead wife's body out of," he seethed.
