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“I mean, he never closed his fist and always calmed down when I cried. It was mostly him standing over me and screaming a bunch of nonsense while I cowered.”
He shakes his head. “He seems like the kind of man who can’t stand up to an equal.”
“Yeah.” I pause. “What was yours like?”
Marius exhales the longest sigh. “I wasn’t stuck with mine the way you were with yours. My mother was his mistress and suffered his visits a few times a month, but he was as controlling as he was sadistic.”
“How?” My fingers curl around his muscle.
“I didn’t realize until much later that he kept her addicted to drugs. It was the reason she wouldn’t try to escape.”
“But you got free?”
“I did.”
The way he says those two words are ominous.
“Did you kill him?” I whisper.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “I failed. It won’t happen again.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitates for several moments, seeming to debate whether to explain but then he shakes his head. “That’s a story for another time. Since you’re feeling better, I’ll bring you something to eat.”
Professor Segul slides out from under me and heads to the door.
My lips part with a protest, but I can’t produce the words. Where I come from, prying into another person’s business could turn a nosy busybody into an accessory.
But in just a few sentences, he’s solved the mystery of what happened to Dad. I’m relieved he isn’t dead, annoyed that he stranded me for something better, but I’m mostly over that wretched old bastard.
Now I’m burning to know how Professor Segul broke free of his father.
ChapterThirty
MARIUS
It galls me that I can’t admit to Phoenix that at the grand old age of twenty-eight, I’m still under the clutches of my father.
However, I hope to change that before I turn twenty-nine.
She probably isn’t in the mood for eating much, but I prepare breakfast nonetheless. It’s only a fruit salad of assorted melons for hydration and honey and banana on toast, which she once mentioned having enjoyed.
By the time I return to Phoenix, she’s fallen back to sleep. Sunlight streams down on her creamy features, highlighting the soft curve of her shoulder.
She looks purer than an angel, lying there with her chestnut hair spilling across the pillows. How in the heavens could anyone treat someone so sweet with such cruelty? Her father should have at least left a text to say he was safe.
I run my hand down the silky skin of her arm, not quite believing that I ensnared a woman who encompasses both decadence and innocence.
Last night’s outburst tells me there’s more to her affection than our financial arrangement. Which is unfortunate, since I intend to leave Marina Village the moment Professor Eckhart is well enough to return to work.
After leaving the tray at the bedside, I walk to the downstairs study, a room with three walls of tall bookshelves and a brass chandelier. I walk past the desk and sit on the sofa overlooking the patio garden and pick up the burner phone.
Quinn answers in one ring. “Mari.”
“Did you get the videos I sent?”
“He was really good,” she says with a chuckle.
