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I flung my arms around his shoulders and pulled him into the tightest hug with no regard to his issues. Instead of pulling away, he wrapped his arms around me as well, gripping me with such strength, I feared for the future of my rib cage. This information certainly explained his intimacy and commitment issues.
We sat like that for what felt like forever but was probably only a minute or two.
“What happened?” I whispered into his neck, still holding onto him tightly, as if my embrace could protect him from something that had happened years ago.
“She wanted to tie me up, but I shot that down. I would never put myself in a position to be that helpless. Probably saved my life.” He said almost absently, as if the idea of his near death didn’t faze him. Considering his line of work, maybe it didn’t. But it fazed me. It terrified me. The idea of no Ivan in my life was a thought I could barely tolerate.
I pulled back. “What did she do?”
“We were…” He looked at me and grimaced slightly.
“Having sex?” I prompted. While it made my stomach twist to think of Ivan having sex with anyone else, I wanted to hear the story and didn’t want to seem childish.
“Yeah.” He gave me a soft look and swiped his thumb softly over my cheek as if to soften the blow of his confirmation. “While she was on top of me, she suggested a blindfold. I said no and she got mad, started complaining that I never wanted to try anything. I think that’s what gave her away. I didn’t fully think she was up to something, but I was getting suspicious. She never…asserted herself in bed. In fact, that she even wanted to be on top was weird, but I was a stupid as fuck kid. Her insistence made me edgy and unsettled, but not enough to stop,” he said, and shot me a regretful look, as if he had cheated on me in the past. I reached up and ran a consoling hand across his chest.
“She waited until I was about to get off.” His eyes looking far away, dragged back to his traumatizing past. “I don’t even know what tipped me off. The energy in the air shifted, her body tensed in an unfamiliar way, some uncharacteristic movement—I’m not sure. I opened my eyes and saw her holding a knife over my head. I barely recognized her. She looked fucking possessed.” He shook his head, as if to rid himself of the troubling image. “I threw her body to the right and rolled left in the nick of time. Well, not entirely. You’ve seen the scars. She managed to catch my side and back. She definitely knew how to wield a knife, but she made a fatal error. She had underestimated her opponent. She assumed I’d be easy to manipulate, that I’d allow her to put me in a defenseless position, and when I didn’t, her ego didn’t allow her to adjust her plan. Even though I was injured, I was so fucking angry, it was like fuel. I think she was in such disbelief at how she’d lost control, it made her easy to disarm. Even injured, I got the knife and immobilized her.”
He paused, his head tipping back again. It was taking all my control not to cradle him against me, soothe him, smother him with affection to make up for how betrayed and lost and wounded he must have felt.
“I found out later, she’d been a pretty successful assassin—a freelancer mostly used by the Italians. The knife had been her particular specialty. To be honest, she could have killed me in a hundred other ways and been successful, but my own naivete worked to my advantage. She was so overconfident, she couldn’t resist using her signature kill move.”
I shook my head, unable to believe that a paid killer had duped Ivan with a fake relationship for months, only to try and kill him on his birthday. “Where is she now?”
“Dead.”
I sat up straighter. “How?”
He tipped his head back up and looked me directly in the eye, his body becoming so rigid he resembled a marble statue. “I killed her.”
Chapter 36
Ivan
Emmy’s jaw dropped slightly as she processed my words. A part of me felt guilty for even talking about this after what she’d just been through. How many fucking shocks can a person take in a day?
My nerves were only now resetting after the fucking rollercoaster it had been on while chasing down Orlov and finding Emmy. I could still feel adrenaline spiking through my bloodstream, though fucking Emmy in the shower had helped in discharging much of it.
I wasn’t even allowing myself to mentally dig into her spontaneous declaration of love. The words felt utterly foreign to me, and I didn’t have the first fucking idea what to do with them. Did I love Emmy? What the fuck did love even mean?
If it meant a bone deep need to protect her coupled with an obsessive desire to fuck her and an overwhelming compulsion to keep her in my sight and at my side, maybe I did love her.
Not that I felt remotely prepared to tell her that. Not before I told her what happened to Elena. My eyes roamed her features, searching for disgust, horror, fear, and ultimately rejection. Few people knew about my relationship with Elena. None knew how she’d died.
“How?” she whispered, sliding off my lap.
I was aware of every bit of space she put between us. She may have moved out of shock, needing space to get her bearings, but I was definitely reading more into her desire for distance. My hands clenched with the need to pull her back on my lap, but I resisted it. My chest burned at the possibility of her leaving altogether. “I snapped her neck.”
She jolted at my succinct reply, momentarily speechless. Her forehead crinkled and, as if reaching some internal conclusion, she nodded her head, as if what I’d said made sense.
It didn’t make sense. I killed an unarmed woman. Sure, Elena had tried to kill me, but I’d gotten the knife. She’d been defenseless. I wasn’t sure Emmy understood that.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Emmy? I killed a woman. A woman with no weapon.”
Her shocked expression softened. “A woman who just tried to kill you.”
I shook my head. Was she defending me…to myself? Of course she was. “I didn’t have to kill her. She was no longer a threat to me.”
Her dark brows drew together, giving her a disgruntled look. “You were at your most vulnerable and she took advantage of you—you were in shock. Your body must have been pumping with adrenaline and anger and fear. Not to mention that you were raised among violence and treachery. It sounds like you acted on instinct.”
