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For the devastation that had just wreaked havoc deep in her soul, the look on his face disarmed her.
He wasn’t hiding anything from her. And that, she realized, she’d never seen in him before. There was always part of him he kept far from her reach, hidden beneath that barrier of cold.
He claimed he couldn’t feel emotion.
But there it was, plain to see.
“Are they alive?” She hated that she had to ask the question, hated that second before he answered.
He nodded.
Her eyes closing, she gasped in a breath, relief expanding her chest. It took her a long moment to open her eyes to him.
“You used me.” Her words croaked through the hard swell of tears still in her throat.
He shifted his body atop her, his knees still trapping her to the bed, but all his weight now adjusted back and off her legs. “I used you? What about how you used me, Vic?”
“I never.”
“You did.” His voice was still soft, haunted. “You wanted out and I was your escape. Don’t think I don’t realize that. Don’t think that I don’t know that you never wanted me, you just wanted out from under your fathers any way you could get it.”
“No. Dammit. I cared for you, Rafe.” Her eyes closed as she drew in a deep breath. “I stupidly, ridiculously, still care for you, even now, in this moment when there is nothing but a wasteland of ash in my belly. I look at you and I cannot not want you—and that sullies everything in me I thought was good and honorable. I know what you did, and I hate myself for still caring, but I do.”
“Vic.”
Her gaze went to slits at him. “Care for you or not, I will walk away from you if you hurt my family. That is, if you don’t kill me first, for I will do whatever it takes—happily die—to keep them safe.” Her words slowed, each one drawing a line in the sand. “My family is everything to me. And you. You will just have to be a footnote of my past if you hurt them. There will be no way forward for us.”
The clarity of her words were stark, even to her own ears. But she would stand by them to her dying breath.
He flinched hard at her words, the concern blinking away, a cold chill snaking onto his irises.
Bloody hell.This wasn’t just a game he was playing with her. It was a game he was playing with her whole family, and she was merely a pawn. And he still intended to go through with it. She could see it in his eyes.
He wasn’t going to give this up for her.
She wasn’t enough.
Why had it taken her so long to ask obvious questions? All things she should have known, should have asked before digging herself in so thick with him that there was no way her heart would let her untangle herself from him.
He released her hands, shoving himself away from her and off the bed.
Leaving her.
Her head on the bed swung to him, a boulder pressing her down on her chest, making her limbs useless. “Don’t…please, Rafe. Don’t.”
He turned away from her and just when she thought he was going to stalk out of the room, he spoke, but didn’t turn around to her. “You don’t know the whole of it.”
He’d paused. Was he actually considering her pleas?
She wedged her elbows under her torso to prop herself up. “What haven’t you told me?”
“I’m working with someone else, and there is no stopping this. Not now. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Who?”
Both of his hands curled into fists, his head bowed. “I can’t tell you that. But I am forced to see this through to the end. There is past to atone for.”
“Please.” She jumped out of the bed, grabbing his upper arm, rounding him. “Please don’t do this, Rafe. Please.”
