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A thousand thoughts came up suddenly. What she could help me do is to forget everything that happened today.
“I’m just looking for some missing money,” I told her instead.
Elia arched a brow. “It must be a lot to have you running out of here and gone all day.”
“It is,” I admitted. “Someone has decided to steal from me, and I’m trying to figure out who the fuck has the balls to do so.”
To my surprise, Elia didn’t shy away from my sudden outburst. “Did you find anything then?” she asked, clearly concerned for my business. I guess it was hers as well, but up until this moment, I hadn’t considered she might actually like to know what was going on with the Mafia.
She might be an asset that I hadn’t expected to find. How much did Elia know about her father’s business? How much did she understand it?
I hadn’t expected her to be a willing participant, but I felt that she wasn’t just a pretty face her father held in his back pocket. She was more astute than I gave her credit for. And her friendship with Lana Keller…No Mafia princess could balance devotion to her family with such a close personal relationship with someone in the DA’s office.
She was not someone to be underestimated.
There was still a lingering doubt in the back of my mind that she was working for her father to advance some hitherto unrevealed goal. But right now, I needed all the help that I could get.
“I didn’t find anything of consequence, no,” I finally said, figuring it was the safest bet for now until I could play this out in my mind just a little more. I wanted to trust her. I really did.
“Your sister,” she began after a few moments of silence, her fingers burning through the sleeve of my shirt. “She said that you and your father didn’t have the best of relationships.”
Fucking Alya. As much as I loved my sister, she had a big mouth sometimes. “Who does?”
“I know I don’t,” Elia admitted.
I looked down at her. She bit her lower lip as she frequently did whenever she was nervous around me, her vulnerability on full display before me. I suddenly wanted to open myself up to her. I wanted to tell her all my secrets. I wanted her to know everything my fucking father had done to me. I wanted her to hear all the ways that I’d suffered to become the son my father needed—the heir the Bratva needed. Somehow, she made me feel like that with just a single stare.
It was dangerous as hell. Because it wasn’t so much that I could just trust her with my secrets.
Could I trust that she would still want to stay with me if she knew?
No…I decided. Nobody could know. The only person who I would allow to know this one dark secret was Boris. And even then, both of us knew better than to speak about it so openly.
I couldn’t tell her what I had done. She could never know what Father forced me to do. I couldn’t tell her about the monster in her bed.The monster whom she bared herself to every night.
But if I refused to talk, Elia was going to start digging into my past. I was sure of that. And no way in hell could I let her do that. I needed her to trust me, which meant that I had to tell hersomething.
“We didn’t have the best of relationships,” I started out, deciding I could hide the darker details of what had happened without telling her everything. “I was his heir. He had requirements of me, of what he thought I had to be to carry on his legacy.”
Elia didn’t remove her hand from my arm, only tightened her hold, and it grounded me somewhat.
“He wanted to prove a point,” I continued, my thoughts drifting back to those days long ago. “That women were only after power.”
Her breath hitched in her throat. “What did he do?”
I swallowed, the words on the edge of my tongue to tell her exactly what he made me do. It would be easy just to fucking tell her and get it over with, but something held me back. “He set a trap,” I lied instead. “And once the trap was sprung, he hurt me. In the worst way a father could hurt a son. He proved his point. And forced me to pick up the pieces.”
Elia was silent, and I was glad. The anger was strumming through my veins as I thought about what really happened and the aftermath that ensued.
Let’s fly away together, Aleks. Just you and me.
That day, I had wanted to kill my father. I wanted to end his miserable life. Instead, I stood there, helpless, as he looked on approvingly. And when he put his hands on my shoulders, telling me softly that I had now learned my lesson, I felt powerless. Helpless. He forced me to do something unforgivable and then made me feel like I was in the wrong.
As ifIhad ruinedhim.
“Is it true?”
Elia’s quiet words reached me and I forced myself back to the present, tucking the events of that day back into the box they resided in. “What?”
