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“Any word from Adam or Olivia?” Max asked.
Ruby shook her head. “I feel sick just thinking about it.”
“I’m sorry.” It wasn’t just a platitude. After Roman — accompanied by Max — had convinced Adam to let Ruby talk to Olivia, they’d called off the man that had been tailing Adam.
Ruby didn’t blame them — they were badly outnumbered by Igor’s men — but the end result was that no one had been watching Adam when he’d disappeared with Olivia.
“It’s not your fault,” Ruby said. “Or Roman’s. I have no right to expect that you’d dedicate someone to following Adam around just to make sure he treats his daughter right.”
That was the part that made Ruby feel the sickest. She’d heard the fear in Olivia’s voice during their conversations, had heard the tension as she’d tried to make it seem like everything was fine with Adam.
Ruby knew that tension. Knew that fear.
She’d been desperate to get Olivia away from Adam and unable to do so because of the complicated custody situation, but at least they’d been in the same city. If push had come to shove, Roman could have beaten down Adam’s door, Brooke could have shown up at the school.
Now Olivia could be anywhere.
Despair rose in Ruby’s body like a rising tide, the urge to scream clawing its way up her throat.
She took a deep breath, forced it down. She’d only given into it once, when she’d been in Roman’s apartment, taking a quick shower and changing her clothes. Then she’d been surrounded by Roman’s things, his memory, his scent. She’d realized how close she was to losing everything.
To losing Roman along with everything else.
She remembered their last night together, when she’d found him bloody and beaten in the bathroom, full of his own despair. She’d spent nearly two months trying to deny her attraction to him, trying not to look at him when he fucked her, afraid of her judging mind.
But that night she’d seen past the dazzling veneer of wealth and authority, the absolute certainty with which Roman seemed to do everything.
He was a man. Not an ordinary one, but still a man.
She’d led him to bed, had wanted to feel him inside her while she could see who he really was. She’d watched his face, had held it in her hands, had kissed the cuts and bruises marring his flesh.
“It’s not your fault either,” Max said, breaking into her thoughts in the hushed quiet of the room.
She looked at him. “Excuse me?”
“You said it’s not my fault that Adam took Olivia, that it’s not Roman’s fault,” Max said. “It’s not your fault either, and neither is this.”
He waved in the direction of Roman on the hospital bed, and she wondered for the thousandth time if there was any awareness behind his closed eyelids, if he could hear them at all.
“I told him to fight,” she said. Could she have convinced him to quit the night he’d come home beaten? Would he have been targeted at the funeral if he had?
“He would have done it anyway,” Max said, answering her unspoken question. “It’s all he knows how to do.”
Max’s voice was heavy with sadness and she shook her head.
“No.” She thought of the way Roman had rescued her from the grain terminal, his care of her in the weeks since, the way he’d protected Olivia even from afar. “He knows how to love too.”
She wondered if Roman knew it. Hoped he would live so she could tell him.
2
ROMAN
He was there all at once (where? he didn’t know), pulled from an abyss so deep, so dark, it was almost painful to leave.
Like being born all over again.
First, nothing. Then, voices.
