Chapter 27

Twenty-Seven

R uby

My husband is a dynamic man. I'm coming to learn, the more time I spend with him, that he is a man of many faces. I no longer think they are false, either. They're simply him. Layers. Angles. Shields .

Yes, he's a dangerous man with dangerous ties, but he's also kind and thoughtful. He concerns himself with my feelings, even if he doesn't always concede my wants.

I hate it, but I no longer hate him.

My feelings for him are complex, and multifaceted. He's a beautiful, arrogant, kind-hearted bastard. And he's my husband. Mine .

I had him inside me, I shudder—not altogether unpleasantly—at the thought .

God, I can still feel him there between my legs, even hours later. I'm sore in a way that isn't unpleasant.

Reaching for a second slice of pizza from the box on the coffee table, I snuggle deeper into the blanket. I caught a chill after our outdoor escapade, and I haven't quite been able to fight it off, even with my scalding bath, and now the fireplace snuggle.

Kirill is lounging on the couch opposite me, the coffee table and pizza between us. He's poured me a glass of red wine, and himself a tumbler of vodka. How the man drinks it the way he does, straight, is beyond me.

"How old are you?"

His eyes, already on me, darken. "Does it matter?"

"Not really, but I'm curious. I know you're older than me. I just don't know how much older."

"Forty-three."

"F—" Okay, I'd been thinking he was closer to thirty-five. Maybe thirty-six. "You're twenty years older than me?"

"Yes."

"You're old enough to be my father."

He flashes me a devilish grin. "Lucky me, I'm your husband."

"I'm serious. Doesn't it feel a little wrong to you?"

He smirks. It's utterly scandalous. Entirely sinful. "Isn't it obvious, I quite like wrong?"

My mouth drops. His lips twitch.

He's taunting me.

I take another bite of my pizza, then, because I can't help myself, I ask, "Do you sometimes feel like I am a child? Like I'm not on your level?"

I don't know why, but the idea sparks fear inside my chest. I don't want him to see me as a little girl. As a child.

I don't know why I care.

He leans forward, planting his elbows on his knees. "Ruby, you are the oldest twenty-three-year-old I've ever met."

A flush of pleasure I can't hide tints my skin. His eyes never drift from mine as he lifts his tumbler, taking a long drink. I cringe a little at the bitter intensity of the straight vodka, shivering at another kind of intensity as his eyes roam over me.

"How do you feel?"

Gosh, I wish he wouldn't ask that. It's such an intimate, revealing question.

"Fine."

"Are you sore?"

"A little," I admit.

Rolling his lips, he gives a single nod. Then he sits back on the couch. In black sweats and a black T-shirt, his hair mussed from our earlier activities—I don't think I've ever been more attracted to him.

Unable to keep the words under lock, I tell him, "This is my favorite, you know?"

"What?"

"When you're dressed like this. The you that I have when we're here, in this cabin."

"How so?"

"Back at the mansion," I take another nibble, considering. "You feel colder, somehow. Less safe, I suppose. Harder, and a little meaner."

"There is more pressure there. I come here to be—" He pauses, and I hold my breath as I wait. Softly, he finishes. "Just me."

I smile gently, because after everything he revealed to me today, I sense he needs it. My kindness and my acceptance of all that he is. Of the man he hides from the world, lest his world pluck him apart piece by piece.

"I like just you."

We fall into silence for a long while. Nothing but the popping of the fire, and Simba's doggy snores sound into the space. I've finished my pizza and am sipping slowly on my wine, my attention forcedly fixed on the dancing flames in the hearth, but I can feel Kirill's eyes on me.

"Are you happy here, Ruby, with me?"

"Here as in the cabin? Or just with you?"

When he doesn't reply, I let my eyes slide to him. He looks boyishly afraid to ask the question he really wants to ask. Finally, I give him the only answer that I have. "I'm learning to be happy. I'm adjusting to a life I never imagined I would lead. A life I couldn't imagine ever being real, not for anyone."

I slide my teeth over my lip as I think. He waits, patiently. "I've read pieces about Stockholm syndrome, and there's a part of me that wonders if that's what is happening here, between us. I wonder if the things I'm beginning to feel for you aren't really my feelings, but a way for me to cope with the horrors you've forced me to endure. I've given you my innocence, something I've cherished for so long. I've clung to dreams of having a family, a quiet, and meaningful life—and now those dreams are slowly, but surely being carved from me. Chipped away with every day you pull the rope of your obsession—or affection—whatever it is, tighter around my heart."

The wine in my glass trembles with the tremors that surge through my body now. My feelings are so intense. So extreme. So raw. "I can't imagine that you could ever really, truly love me. Not when the dynamics of our power are so unbalanced. In the end, you hold the chains that bind me. That's just the reality of what we are, and I'm not sure that anything real and honest can be born of this thing that we are."

His face is hard, but there's a cavernous upset in the void of his coffee eyes. Something that tells me I've struck a chord, landed a lash to the bleeding wound that is my honest, raw, ugly truth.

My voice is smaller, my grief spilling from the depths of me I wish I could drown. "And then there's my father. His death is on your hands and?—"

"I did not kill him."

An ocean of grief swims in my eyes. "But your brother did. And you let him. You kept me in a dungeon, interrogating me for months—while my father was hunted, and killed. Like an animal."

"He lived like an animal, Ruby. A man lives as an animal, eventually, he'll die as an animal."

Clamping my teeth down on my lip, I swallow my cry and struggle to regain control of myself before I speak. "I still can't see it, you know? Even after the photos. I know it's true—I saw—" My voice breaks, and a tear rolls hot down my cheek. "I've replayed so many memories—I just—there was never a sign."

"I'm not lying. I've never lied to you."

I look at him now, searching his dark eyes with my own. "Will you tell me how he died?"

"Fuck," he bites out, pitching forward to plant his elbows on his knees. His hands ball into a fist between spread knees, and he bows his head. "You don't want to know that."

"I don't want to know." God, my heart is hurting. It's so, so sore. "But I need to know. I've played it out a thousand ways—each worse than the last. I—I don't want to keep playing out terrible scenes."

"He was tortured."

"God," I sob, covering my mouth with my hands.

His eyes lift to mine, and I nod, telling him without words to continue. I can't trust myself to speak.

The cool mask I've come to know so well slides into place, and his words fall hard into the space between us. His eyes never leave mine. "Ilya has a very particular way of killing. He flays his victims." He draws a line down the center of his chest, sternum to navel. "When they are open to him, he likes to look in their eyes, watching the light of their soul as it flickers, and brightens. He pushes his hand behind the rib cage—to the heart. He kills his victims by tearing the heart from their chest. This is how your father died, after he was tortured."

Nothing—nothing I could have imagined came close to the reality my father suffered in his end.

I'm no longer certain that I will fare better knowing. I could have lived a hundred years, playing a new scene of horror every day, and I don't think I ever could have imagined something quite so horrific. So brutal. So—soulless.

Setting my wine on the table, tears falling from my eyes to paint my face in grief, I stand. My voice is somehow even, although it is quiet. "You're right. I didn't want to know that."

"Ruby," he calls, but I'm already escaping up the stairs.

Behind the closed door of the bedroom, I share with my husband, in this rustic mountain oasis so far from the horrors of our life together, I fall to the floor and sob. I sob for the man I'd loved, but never really known. I sob for the years Mama spent loving someone who never existed. For the years she'd been faithful to a faithless man. I cry for the horrors that seem to thrive in the shadows, and the shadows are everywhere .

As my tears run dry and my thoughts drift to the man on the other side of the door, my heart shatters again for the little boy who was broken by a cruel world, his pieces reconstructed into the man of polished sin cloaked in crime.

I ache for the young woman with shattered dreams, and a stolen heart that just can't help but bleed for the man that keeps her.

And I ache, because even through it all, I'm not sure I want to flee anymore.