Something inside me stills. “How old were you?”
He hesitates, just for a moment. “Ten.”
The word lands like a stone dropping straight through me. My mind struggles to make sense of it. Of the boy he was and the man he was forced to become.
He clasps the back of my neck and leans his forehead to mine. “I will be here for you through all of it. Whatever you need, however long it takes. And as long as I am alive, no one will ever touch you or your parents again. That is not a promise. It is the truth.”
I wrap my arms around him and rest my head against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart and wondering how someone born into that kind of violence could become this.
Gentle. Safe. Mine.
Turning off the water, he reaches for a towel, wrapping me in it before drying himself with another. Then he lifts me like I weigh nothing and carries me to the bed, setting me down carefully. He grabs one of his shirts and slips it over my head, then pulls on his own clothes and climbs in beside me.
Settling onto his back, he winds an arm around my waist and draws me over him until I’m stretched across his chest, held firmly in the warm, hard strength of his body.
“Is he dead?” I don’t know why I’m asking when I already know the answer.
“Yes.” His fingers trace soft, lazy patterns on my back.
I close my eyes. Not in horror or relief, but in resignation.
This is who my husband is. I’m a prosecutor married to a mobster. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
“Do you want to ask me anything else?”
I lift my head and look down at him. “Do you know who sent them?”
He goes quiet, and something twists in my gut. “Not yet.”
Did he just lie?
“I know you’re scared, but I won’t let them get near you. Not again. I will find them all and hunt them down because this is who I am, Fiona. This is who your husband is.”
There’s something brutal in his stare, something wild and untamed like the lion he proudly bears on his chest. But I see something else: his fear that this is where I pull away. That I won’t want him anymore.
Instead, I lean in and press a kiss to the scar just beneath where the lion tears apart the wolf. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m your wife. Because I’m not going anywhere.”
His breath stutters. Then his arm squeezes around me and he tilts my jaw closer, kissing me slow, the passion and affection seeping through his pores.
I get lost in his kiss. In the way his hands roam my body. In the way he flips me under him and slides inside, rocking slowly as he stares deep into my eyes, making me forget everything but the way it feels when we’re together.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
FIONA
“Come on.What are you afraid of?”
Aleksei’s words drift across the warm breeze, laced with that familiar teasing edge as he taps the seat of the sleek black-and-red sports bike between his thighs. The same one he leaned against the day he chased me through the woods.
That feels like a lifetime ago. Everything has changed, yet somehow nothing has.
Like the impossible question lingering in the back of my mind: how do I stay with him and still keep my job?
“Well, for starters, the fact that you could kill me.” I’m only half teasing, but the idea of riding with him sends a spark through me.
He’s been asking for days and I keep saying no, yet some part of me craves the thrill of it. The freedom, the wind in my hair, the long stretch beneath us as he flies down the road.
He holds out a helmet, resting it on his knee, one hand wrapped around the handlebar. I cross my arms and arch a playful brow, but I don’t step toward him.
