“There’s a shooting range in the building beside the garage. The garage is temperature controlled and houses five cars. Over it is a full apartment complete with its own kitchen. There are four guesthouses on the property as well as a gym where we do combat training. There is also an area for the leopards to train, with ladders and small tunnels and various obstacles to keep their skills sharp.We have a range in the swamp for them to engage in fighting skills as well as hunt live food.”
“Did you think Fyodor’s mother deserved to be murdered?” There was no judgment in Maya’s voice, but how could she not be judging him when he judged himself?
He hadn’t thrown her off topic by his revelations on all the interesting perks of the property. He should have known. In any case, he was determined to give her the truth of who he was. If they were going to have a relationship, she should know what she was getting into.
“She never once tried to stop Patva from beating Timur or Fyodor or turning the three of us over to his men for beatings. He was a sadistic bastard, but she would hide and allow him to torture the three of us. Being gang raped or beaten with whips or chains wasn’t out of the question. That didn’t rally her to defend any of us, not even Timur.”
He didn’t sound bitter, because he wasn’t. He was indifferent. Maya had ceased following him, forcing him to stop as well. He indicated the hall. “The house has eight bathrooms. This is one of the guest bathrooms. There’s only one guest bedroom on this floor. There’s an office, and the rest of the floor is taken up with the primary suite.”
He opened the door to the bedroom to show her the spacious room. It was beautiful and had its own bathroom. The bedroom was enormous and could easily have been a second primary suite. The floor was wood, the bed large and comfortable looking, and a sitting area by the windows invited reading or visiting. A small desk with a lamp was against one wall, but otherwise the room was kept open and spacious. The closet was a walk-in and could have been a small nursery.
The bathroom was large as well, with a deep jacuzzi tub and a two-person shower. Gorya wanted to get Maya out of there as quickly as possible. She seemed to take a great deal of interest in it as she wandered around the room,looking anywhere but at him. Truthfully, it had occurred to him that she could sleep there until Wraith got further along in her heat, but his odd reaction to the close proximity of his bodyguards to Maya had him changing his mind.
She followed him down the hall, silence stretching between them. He didn’t turn around to look at her face. She was a deceiver, the same as he was. She wasn’t going to give anything away unless she wanted to. That little smile she’d teased him with had been as practiced as the easygoing charm he was so famous for. It was a little scary how alike they were. On the other hand, he was grateful. She might be the only woman in the world who could live with him.
He’d disclosed information about himself he had never told anyone. Inadvertently, he had also told her things about other family members he was certain they hadn’t told anyone. He’d been casual about it, but she’d heard him. Maya was a woman who didn’t miss much.
“I didn’t think she deserved Patva’s way of killing her, but was I terribly upset about her death? In all honesty? No. I wish I could say I was. I know Ishouldfeel emotion for her death, but it would be a lie if I said I did. I wasn’t certain what she did with her time other than hide away and ignore her children.”
Maya remained silent, and Gorya stopped at the entrance to the primary bedroom, turning to look at her face. The door was reinforced with steel between the thick slabs of wood. The suite was practically designed as an enormous safe room. Gorya rested a hip against the door and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Patva, like all the men in the lair, expected us to join him in beating the mothers to death to prove loyalty to thebratva.I wasn’t loyal to them or to Patva. I don’t beat women, and I knew Timur wasn’t about to hurt his mother. He tried to stop his father. I couldn’t allow Patva to kill Timur.”
He rolled his shoulders in a slight shrug. “I was smaller than Fyodor and Timur, so no one ever considered me a threat. Rogue didn’t have the obvious bulk that their leopards did. He was sleek and long but deadly fast. I trained him away from everyone, including Timur and Fyodor.”
Her blue-gray eyes didn’t move from his face. “Why?”
Gorya allowed his gaze to drift over her delicate features. She was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful. She would catch the attention of other men if they looked too closely. How had she gotten away from the shifters who should have been watching for an unattached female?
“I recognized very early that I was different. That Rogue was. Not just my appearance but the way I thought. The way I moved. My speed. The more I trained, the more apart I was from them. I didn’t want my cousins to see me as different. And I was worried that the way I craved violence—the things that went through my head when I planned to take down Patva and his men—made me just like them.”
He had brought his gaze back to her eyes, watching carefully, missing nothing. He interrogated prisoners all the time. He read others easily. Everyone had little subtle tells that gave them away, but not Maya. She continued to observe him with the same expression on her face. He couldn’t detect judgment. He couldn’t detect anything at all.
She had the longest eyelashes and a perfect bow of a mouth. The longer he looked at her face and took in each detail, the more he found himself fixated on it.
“Keep going.”
Maya’s voice penetrated his dazed distraction and he realized for the first time the sound had a mesmerizing quality to it. Captivating. Even compelling. She could catch a man off guard if he wasn’t careful. She had far more weapons at her disposal than guns and knives, maybe much more lethal ones. He was fascinated with her more than ever, and that was dangerous.
“I had already begun hunting Patva’s men. I started first by disrupting his arms deals. He supplied arms all over the world. He’d negotiate deals, take large down payments and then ship the guns after the deals were finalized. I would ruin the guns or dump them. I shifted blame to whoever was in charge, someone he’d always trusted and their crew. When I first started, I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. He never considered me a threat. No one ever did.”
She nodded her head in approval. “Nice. Essentially, you let Patva punish his men. You didn’t have to risk your leopard or yourself at that point by going up against grown men. You just used your brains.” A little frown flitted across her face. “But you did have to sabotage the weapons. That was a big risk.”
“Patva didn’t just punish his men.” It was important to Gorya that Maya understand the extent of what was going on in his childhood lair. “He tortured them. He wanted to break them. He destroyed their families in front of them, not that any of them had families to speak of. Most had murdered their wives already at his command. If they had daughters, they sold them or killed them—again, at Patva’s command. Their sons were just as bad or worse than they were. They would take delight in raping and torturing. They let their leopards hunt humans. Again, even as a child, I didn’t feel the emotions I should have when Patva blamed them and they weren’t responsible. I was elated.”
Again, he waited for condemnation. Again, she surprised him. She nodded. “Those were some of the men Patva gave you and your cousins to when he decided you needed to be punished.”
She was astute. He rubbed his jaw to cover the sudden urge to step into her space and pull her to him. He didn’t like touching others—and he didn’t kiss women. That was too intimate. There couldn’t be intimacy between him and anyone else. Just the thought of it made his skin crawl and his leopard rage—until Maya.
He nodded his head slowly. “I marked every one of them. I never said a word to my cousins. I made certain Rogue would never talk about our plans or our training to the other leopards. I allowed Patva’s punishments, the beatings and rapes, anything he threw at me, without ever fighting back. I let him think me a coward. Fyodor and Timur protected me as best they could. I wasn’t defiant when they were around because I didn’t want to put them in the position of having to defend me. Timur often got in trouble coming to my defense. I had to be careful never to show my speed to him or to Patva’s men.”
“That must have been a pretty narrow tightrope you walked every day.”
There was respect in her voice, but with her, he couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not. He wasn’t going to consult Rogue. He had to be able to read her on his own if they were going to live together. They had to be real together, and she had to be on the same page with him. He stepped back, away from the door, worried that once he opened it, she would slip back into fight-or-flight mode.
“It was good preparation for my life. I was able to train mentally and physically nearly every second of the day and night.”
“But your family doesn’t really know who you are.”
