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“Have you seen him?”
“Who?” I gasp out, the edges of my sight blurring.
“Your lover.”
He says it like a death threat, and God knows he means it as one, yet somehow despite my dizziness, I manage to feign shock. He’s never asked me about the mysterious books that kept showing up until five months ago. He doesn’t know that Frankie found a way to tell me he’s alive.
“You said you’d killed him.” My voice is little more than a croak. “That night in the basement.”
He chuckles darkly. “We left him as close to death as a man can be.” He brings his face up even closer and I shrink back into the mirror. “We took turns to piss on him at the end,meelaya. All nine of us. We made sure that Italian fire was extinguished before we left.”
Nausea swells up inside me again. “You lied to me.”
“Did you mourn him?”
“I mourn a lot of things about my life.”
“Then I am here to lighten your burden. Francesco Lastra has been living in Monaco for the last few years with his adopted brother.” His eyes are drilling into me as he says it, feasting on my slightest reaction like that hungry shark again. “Do you know what else is in Monaco, Ada? Women… The finest women in the world outside of Russia. I hear Lastra has developed quite a taste for them. Two…three a night…Every night…Filling them with his filthy mafia seed as they beg and scream for it.” He chuckles again. “And you callmethe animal?”
That bullet starts ricocheting through my heart again, blasting holes, making me bleed red agony.
Books, I tell myself hazily.If he didn’t care about me anymore, he wouldn’t have sent me all those books.
But he stopped.
Five months ago.
Have I lost him?
Have I truly lost everything now?
“Say you’re right,” I rasp, forcing myself to confront my worst fears. “Say heisalive. Why would he come back for me? And why now after fourteen years?”
You should have let me go, Frankie. You’ll hate me when I tell you what I’ve done, and that look as it passes across your face will be a permanent shadow across my sun.
“This is true.” He drops his hand from between my legs with a look of contempt. I can tell there’s not a flicker of life in his cock, either.We’re dead to each other, yet here we are: trapped in this twisted, loveless, hate-filled net of a forced marriage. “There is nothing left of you that could satisfy a man, Ada. You are like an old whore: scarred, lame, and used up. I doubt you could even bear his child.”
“You tried to have me sterilized against my will!”
“You don’t even see the boy that youdohave.”
Alex.
“And who’s fault is that?”
Kirill releases me and wipes his hand down the front of his black jacket, like he’s been caught touching something unclean.
Scarred.
Lame.
Used up.
His vicious words are seeping in through my cracks and filtering down into my ruins.
“Alex is in the car outside, Ada, but he will never see you. I have told him everything he needs to know about you. The boy is a man now and he has his own thoughts. You disgust him. As far as he is concerned, his pig of a mother died in childbirth.”
“You bastard,” I whisper again, fighting the urge to run to the fire exit, fly down the stairs, rip open the car door, and tell my son the truth.
