“No, but I’m worried.”
“I know,” he says quietly. “He’s safe. No one is getting to him.”
“I thought agreeing to this marriage was going to protect him. I thought being able to move here permanently to be near him was the silver lining in all this, but all it did was give them more leverage.”
“He’s safe,” he repeats.
I pick up my phone when Melody’s message lights up on the screen. Tommy’s fine. He’s asleep.
“He really loves his room, by the way.” I tuck my phone into my purse. “Thank you for that. For giving him his own place.”
Kaz grips the steering wheel harder.
“I know you don’t have to let him stay with us.”
“He’s a little boy. He shouldn’t be used as leverage by fucked up grownups.” He says this with such force, I think he’s speaking from experience.
“When Alexander mentioned your mother’s phone call, you seemed tense. Do you speak with her?” I tiptoe toward the subject of his parents.
“Not often. She’s in Russia,” he says.
“Yes, Megan mentioned that. She also said your mom won’t ever come back here?”
His knuckles whiten. “She hates this country. She has no pleasant memories here.”
“Weren’t you and your brothers raised here?” I ask softly. What sort of mother would suggest having her children didn’t qualify as pleasant memories?
“She wasn’t the motherly type.” He rolls his shoulders. He doesn’t need to say anything else; I understand exactly what he means.
She did her duty, gave her husband sons, then went on about her life.
“Did your parents have an arranged marriage?” I swallow, glancing out the window as we pass through the thick iron gates blocking Kaz’s drive. “Like ours?”
Silently, he pulls the car to a stop in front of the garage. The hum of the engine cuts short after Kaz parks, and I reach for my door handles. He places a hand on my knee, squeezing to get my attention.
“Our marriage is nothing like theirs.” He scrubs his hand over his mouth.
He seems like he needs a moment. Like he’s not sure if he wants to go into details or not.
“My father used us against my mother when she angered him. Eventually she realized it was better to be free from all of us than to fight him.”
“But they were forced to marry, just like us, right?” I press gently.
He pauses. “No one forced me to marry you, Sienna.”
I pull back. “What do you mean? I thought you had to, in order to bring peace.”
“It was already over, the fighting. I could have told them no, and the truce probably would have still happened.”
“So you married me purely to get back at my family? You wanted to hurt them by hurting me. But you didn’t realize they don’t care about me at all, did you?”
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he’s quick to assert.
“You were going to humiliate me, make my life as miserable as you could. I’d complain to my uncle, my cousins maybe and there would be nothing they could do about it. They’d have to watch while you took their money, ran their businesses out of town, and neglected one of their own.”
“It wasn’t one of my best plans. I admit.”
“If my family cared about me at all, it would have worked. But I guess you got screwed in the end.”
