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“You will be my first and my last.” I kissed her. A fleeting but full of feeling kiss. “We do this, and there is no one else. Ever.”
“No one else.” She nodded. “Ever. Tonight is the first night of all our nights. The night where no other nights exist.”
“Exactly,” I groaned, embracing the full-body tremble she caused. “And if you can still stand to touch me once you know who I am, I’m going to carry you to that beach. I’m going to lay you down, kiss you, and do what I’ve wanted to do ever since the day I realised I was stupidly in love with you.”
“Stupidly?”
“Crazily, madly, dangerously...completely.”
The pain in her eyes softened a little. She found healing in my love, which only made me want to give her more. To shower her in it, bathe her in it, make her swim in it night and day so she never had to reach the shore again.
It took effort, monumental effort, but I let her go.
Taking a step back, doing my best not to fear what lived in the sand beneath my feet, I kept my eyes locked on hers and confessed, “My name is not Aslan Avci.”
“Wait...what?”
“It’s Aslan Kara. And I’m not the son of a kind math professor but am the one and only heir to Cem Kara...the biggest crime lord in Turkey.”
Chapter Forty-Five
*
Aslan
*
(Moon in Russian: Luna)
NERI DIDN’T MOVE.
She blinked but that was it.
“Wash, canim. Wash and I’ll talk.”
In a daze, her hands came up, sluicing seawater over her breasts.
Ignoring my pounding cock, I allowed all my secrets to claw me back into their midst.
“Why would I suffer a fate far worse than death?” I whispered, keeping my voice down so I didn’t wake Melike or summon my mother’s and Afet’s attention.
“Because...you aren’t one of us.” My father winced. “That came out wrong. You are one of us. You are my son. You are ours, Aslan. You always have been. You proved that the day you solved those math problems better than any student. You might not share our blood, but you share everything else.”
I froze. “I’m not...I’m not yours by blood? I wasn’t born to you?”
He shook his head.
I struggled to breathe. I wanted to leap to my feet and pace. To shout and scream. But the captain glowered at us, ensuring we obeyed his rules of staying quiet and calm, shoved into too small a boat, slipping through the night and into open seas.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we left behind our names, our homes, our very way of life because it was the only way to keep you safe. We forged your birth certificate to get you a passport. I used contacts to get us out. I’ve done everything I can to make you completely untraceable because...your true father is hunting for you. And he won’t stop.”
My voice blended past with present, spilling everything I’d learned on that fateful voyage. “My family has always been gifted with numbers. My father with his teaching and his brother with accounting. They earned a reputation for being so talented that Cem Kara approached them. My father and uncle declined his offer, but...over the course of two years, Kara managed to feed enough of his business—through nameless companies and shell outfits—through my uncle’s firm, that he didn’t have a clue he’d become his main accountant.
“Once Kara told him, that was it. My uncle knew too much. He was his for life and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Of course, Kara paid him well. My uncle bought a new house, new car...he got a little flashy. My father didn’t agree with any part of it and put distance between them. It hurt because he and his brother were close, but my father didn’t like what Cem Kara did, and he lost respect for his brother. At the time, my father and mother had been trying for kids but couldn’t get pregnant. They refused to take money from my uncle for medical help but then...one night, my uncle pitched up with a baby. He told my mother—my adoptive mother—that I’d been the product of a drug deal gone wrong and belonged to no one. No one alive, that is. He said he’d found me alone and screaming. He gave my parents the option of keeping me as theirs or...hand me into the police and let the system have me.
“They chose to make me an Avci. I was loved and adored for years, and when my mother fell pregnant with Melike, we all believed we were blessed. I never questioned that my cheekbones and nose were different to both my parents. Never thought to enquire why I was taller than my father even at thirteen. I believed wholeheartedly they were mine and I was theirs.”
Neri kept bathing, ducking into the ocean, covering her shoulders as her hands roamed down her body. “But you weren’t a drug deal gone wrong? You were the leader’s son...”
