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She falls silent then, helping me strip the sheets, both of us still naked, and despite that and the red streaks still all over us both, it’s strangely domestic. I’ve never stood on the opposite side of a bed with a woman before, taking the bedding off and bundling it into a hamper, discussing where the extra sheets might be kept.
“I could look,” she offers, and I hesitate for a moment, wondering if it’s a ploy to give her a chance to make a run for it, when her eyes suddenly widen and she stoops, reaching for something on the floor.
She tries to sneak it beneath the mattress before I can see, but I catch it too quickly. “What’s that?” I ask, some of the sharpness returning to my tone.
“Nothing,” she says, but I know her well enough by now to know when she’s lying.
I’m around the side of the bed in an instant, grabbing for what’s still in her hand. She tries to resist, but I get it from her easily, and the moment it’s in my hand I know what it is.
A strange sense of betrayal floods me, coupled with a rage that I’d almost forgotten in the last hour that I could feel towards her.
It’s the photo of Mika and her son, and the idea that Natalia saw it, took it,hidit from me makes me so angry that I can feel myself starting to shake.
“What did you think you’re doing with this?” I ask, my voice trembling with barely restrained violence. I see her eyes widen as she hears it, and she backs up a little, her hands rising defensively. I see, in that moment, that she knows she’s gone too far.
“I–who are they?” She looks at me, her teeth sinking into her lower lip, and it’s all I can do not to lunge for her, violence bubbling in my veins, the reminder of why all of this has happened in the first place rushing back in an overwhelming wave.
“That’s none of your fucking business,” I snarl at her, my teeth clenched with anger. “Howdareyou go through my things? When the fuck did you find this?”
“The night I was–going around the house,” Natalia says, her voice shaking too. “I wasn’t–”
“Don’t youdaresay you weren’t trying to snoop.”
She swallows hard, and then I see a flash of her fire, the moment when she decides that she’s in so deep that she might as well fight back.
“Fine,” she snaps. “I was snooping. I was trying to find out something about you that might get me out of this place. If you can’t understand that, then you’re more deluded than I realize. If anything, finding that made me realize that there is some deeper reason why you’ve been doing all this psychotic shit.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I grit out, tossing the photo onto the mattress before I accidentally end up crumping it in my fist. “You’ve gone too far this time–”
“You’re really going to tell me that has nothing to do withthis?” She gestures wildly to herself, the room, everything around us. “Really? You’re going to tell me it’s none of my business, that they don’t have something to do with why I’m here?”
“If I wanted to fucking tell you, I would have!”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I could have told you more if I knew what you fucking wanted!”
She nearly screams the last words at me, something cracking within her too, and we stare at each other for a long moment, both breathing hard.
I move towards her, sinuous and threatening, and I see her back up, but there’s nowhere for her to go. The back of her legs hit the nightstand, and she flinches in the instant before I’m on her, my hand grabbing the back of her neck in a punishing grip.
“That picture,” I hiss between my teeth, “is the other half of why I hunted you down, Natalia.”
“Your wife?” she whispers, and I laugh, shaking my head.
“No. I’ve never been that close to any woman. The woman in the picture was my sister, Mika. The little boy was her son. Do you know what your father did to them, Natalia?”
She shakes her head, a tiny, frightened motion as she looks at me, more fear than I’ve ever seen her show filling her eyes.
“He gave Mika to his guards. He let them fuck her, over and over again, in front of her son. He let them hurt her while they did it. And then he killed her in front of her son, and killed him too. Are you going to tell me that you don’t know why he did that?”
“I don’t,” Natalia gasps. “I told you. I didn’t know anything that he did–not like that. I never would have known.”
“He did it because I refused to help him stage a coup over Viktor’s Bratva. I refused to participate in having Caterina Andreyva kidnapped and tortured. I refused to betray my boss. So your father took the only people I loved, the only family I had, and tortured them. Had my sister gang-raped and murdered, my nephew shot after he watched that happen to his mother, to punish me.”
I lean closer to her, shaking with the rage pulsing through me, the pain of it as fresh and violent as the day I learned what happened from the man who took me to their bodies.
“That’s why I kidnapped you, Natalia. To punishyou, the way he did to me.”
Natalia
