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“I’ll talk to Boss about it. We’ll come up with a solution for Mando’s security,” Viktor said. “You guys are free to go. I know Mando has meetings soon. He’s going to need you.”
They both nodded and left the gym. The rest of us stayed, needing to talk about what to do for Sephie. We stood in silence for a moment.
Ivan looked at the rest of us. “I think at this point she won’t care that I told you guys. Sephie killed her uncle the night she got those scars. She had blocked it out until the night of the ball. When she was out on the plane, she relived that night. All of it. The beating, the whip, all of it. But this time, her memory let her remember everything. She sliced his Achilles’ heel like she told all of us, but she stabbed him in the heart once he went down. She says she remembers standing over him and watching him die. He reached for her leg as he was struggling, but she picked her leg up out of his reach and stomped the knife further into his heart.” He paused to look at our faces. Ivan enjoyed shocking us, so he wanted to drink this in for a moment. “I told Adrik that I had told Sephie her beast mode was activated that day she shot the guy in the face when they were trying to grab her. But then I said her beast mode has always been activated once he told me about her uncle. I think I was wrong both times. I think we just watched her beast mode activate for real today. I’ve never seen her so angry and yet so in control as she was today. We woke the beast and the beast is now fully under her control.”
I couldn’t help but feel excited about how her training would progress, assuming she handles the day’s events well. “I have so many ideas on how to progress her training from here. Not even going to pretend I’m not excited about that.”
Viktor smiled, but in his true reasonable fashion, said, “While I share in your excitement, we need to make sure she’s okay with what happened today too. It could set her back and we don’t want that.”
I looked to Ivan. “You seem to know what she needs to hear about this. How do we help her through this?”
“I think she’ll handle it better than you guys think. When I said that she just delivered his sentence, she said that to me when I told her about my past. She said, ‘Sometimes karma uses you to deliver justice. You just handed down their sentences.’ I think the more she hears that Mike wasn’t walking out of here alive today, the more she’ll accept it. I also reminded her that what’s said in anger is the truth. Then I told her how thankful I was no broccoli was harmed today,” he said, chuckling. Misha and I looked at each other laughing, remembering that awkward day with Tori in the kitchen at the house.
“I think she knows on some level that Mike never would’ve stopped. Before you guys walked into the ring, Boss had told me that Mike was done, but he was going to let him live. Sephie disagreed. She said he was never going to let this go and that he’d spend the rest of his life trying to get to her or that he’d run straight to Sal and tell him everything he knew. She was right. That’s when I told her I bet her ten bucks he was already dead,” Viktor said.
“She told me that day at the house that she felt nothing about killing her uncle. I think that might be the case here too. We all know how emotional she can get when something is really bothering her. She feels her emotions very strongly. She was completely void of emotion standing there looking at him,” Ivan said.
“She shouldn’t feel anything about killing her uncle. Or Mike. They both had it coming,” Misha said.
Stephen said, “We all heard her on the plane struggling against what her uncle used to call her. I think he and Mike were cut from the same cloth.”
Ivan looked at him, his anger visible. “That’s not even the half of it. He used to kick her in the stomach, calling her a whore. He would tell her he was making sure she wouldn’t bring home another mouth to feed. One night, she hemorrhaged and couldn’t stop bleeding. Her uncle thought she was having a miscarriage, so he took her to a dirty doctor that would do back-room procedures for cash. The doc did an ultrasound and found scar tissue in her uterus from her uncle’s repeated kicks to her stomach. Her uncle was convinced she had gotten pregnant, so he told the doctor to take her uterus. She pleaded with him not to, but she was sixteen. Her uncle had guardian rights over her, so the doctor did it anyway.”
I felt my anger rise, as I cursed under my breath. I could clearly see the anger on everyone else’s faces too. Misha said, “I still feel horrible about bringing that up. I was just trying to tease her. I had no clue that it would be that horrific.” He ran his hand through his hair, his face turning red as he struggled to control his own emotions.
“You didn’t know, Misha. She’s not going to hold it against you,” I said.
“I’m going to hold it against me,” he said as he walked away from us. I started to go after him, but Ivan stopped me.
“Give him a minute. This is a lot and we all know he blames himself first,” he said.
“Does anybody know who this doctor is?” Stephen asked.
“I haven’t been able to find anything so far, but I’ve been looking into it. I haven’t asked Sephie for specifics on where she lived with her uncle, but from what she’s told us about her story, I’ve sectioned off a few areas of the city. I’ve got people trying to find out in each area if they know of a doctor that used to do those kinds of procedures. So far, I can’t find anything,” Ivan said. “But I’m not stopping until I find him.”
“Good,” we all said at once.
A couple of hours had passed and Sephie still hadn’t come back down from the penthouse. Viktor called Adrik to check on her. He told us to come up to the penthouse. We weren’t sure what to expect when we walked in, but she was curled up, half on Adrik, half beside him on the couch, sound asleep.
He put his finger up to his lips, indicating we should be quiet, but he motioned us to come and sit. “She didn’t sleep well last night and after we showered, she said she was really tired. I think her adrenaline wore off. We came in here and it didn’t take long at all before she passed out. I don’t want to move and risk waking her up right now.”
“She’s not having nightmares, is she?” I asked, suddenly concerned.
He shook his head no. “Not so far.” He pointed to her fingers, which were lightly moving on his chest. “She only does this when she’s dreaming happy dreams. I think she’s playing the piano, it’s always rhythmic when she does it,” he said. He couldn’t help the smile that crept across his face as he watched her sleeping against him.
“That’s quite possibly the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen,” Misha said.
“How was she when you guys came upstairs?” Viktor asked.
Before he could answer, Ivan said, “I told them about her uncle. They know.”
Adrik nodded. “She said she feels much the same now as she did with her uncle. Completely void, I think were her exact words.”
We all looked at Ivan, who gave us all a smirk. Viktor spoke first, “What does she need from us? We want to make sure that she’s okay with what happened today. I don’t want it to set her back at all, either in her training or otherwise.”
Adrik looked to Ivan and said, “What Ivan said to her seemed to do the trick. I think we might need to remind her of that a few times, but I also think she knows this was the only outcome today.” He looked back to Viktor. “Did you tell them what she said right after?”
Viktor nodded. “I think she knows too. I just want to make sure she believes it. We want to make sure she’s okay.”
