My monster.
The one who keeps all the other monsters at bay.
“You’re quiet, Krasnyy.” Two large, ink-covered, calloused fingers find purchase beneath my chin. He gives me no choice but to look him in the face. The man is devastatingly handsome. Outrageously so. His stormy eyes peer into mine, eyebrow raised in curiosity as he stares at me, drawing out the deepest secrets that linger within the depths of my soul.
All without having to say a word.
“These last few days, I could hardly get you to keep quiet, especially with your sister around,” he teases. “Did I finally fuck it out of you?”
An unladylike snort escapes my lips at his bluntness. A trait I find common among most of his Russian comrades. “You wish.”
Then I sigh. “It’s nothing.” I try my best to dismiss it, but he isn’t letting it go. His eyes turn hard, his grip on my chin tightening at my lie.
“Ava.” The warning in his voice is clear as day. I’d be a fool to ignore it. A small part of me wants too though. To challenge that tone, but I’m far too exhausted. Instead, I let out anotherdramatic sigh, which causes his deliciously kissable lips to upturn slightly at the corners.
“I just keep… dreaming,” I whisper, mostly to the dark because talking to him is kind of hard. Not going to lie. Matthias is a man who wants to fix everything. It’s in the way he is built. The need to protect and slay is woven into the fabric of his DNA.
Or programmed into his software if I keep up with my cyborg theory.
His idea of protection is making the problem disappear, and sometimes—well, sometimes that isn’t possible.
Like now.
“Nightmares?” he whispers as the hand tucked around me gently caresses my naked side.
“That and—” God, this is difficult. Matthias is accustomed to death. He’s grown up with it. To take a life, to see a life snuffed out—it is nothing to him. Just another day at the office. How do I tell a man who’s grown up knowing nothing but violence that the deaths of the men who attacked us haunt me? That even though they would have killed him and taken me, it still feels… wrong. “I don’t deal with death like you do. I don’t enjoy it. I’m not used to it.”
There. I said it.
Matthias releases my chin, settling back into the mountain of pillows behind him, the arm now stretched behind his head comfortably. I feel oddly bereft at the loss of his touch on my chin. His hand around my waist still circles casually, but there has been something more intimate about being made to face him.
His silence now, when I want nothing more than to hear the deep timber of his voice, unnerves me. The only sound in the ridiculously large room is the sound of our breathing. Mine still panting, my body thrums like a live wire, always anticipating.
He has that effect on me. His touch on my skin constantly leaves a trail of electricity in its wake that never seems to wear off. I think maybe I have offended him. That at any moment, he will get up and leave. Or maybe even ask me to. Then again, in the little time I’ve known my new husband, I haven’t once seen him become offended.
Livid?
Fuck yeah.
But offended?
Never.
My Uncle Dante once said only weak men get offended. Powerful men let it pass. And Matthias is undoubtedly strong.
“I wasn’t always like this, malyshka.” He lets out a long, heavy breath, his gaze never wavering from the ornate ceiling. Something tells me it makes it easier for him to speak. “I was never really innocent. Not growing up with a man like my father, but there was a time when violence wasn’t who I was or who I wanted to be.”
“What happened?” My voice is small. I am afraid that if I speak too loudly, I will snap the thin thread of openness he is displaying to me, and he will once again shut me out. I don’t want that. I want him to be open with me. He knows everything about me, whether I like it or not, and I know practically nothing about him.
“You have to understand something, Red,” he whispers to me. “I was eleven when my father chucked me onto the cold streets of St. Petersburg with nothing but the clothes on my back. Every day I fought for food, clothing, shelter. The streets could be violent, but no one had ever tried to actively kill me. I’d been in my fair share of scrapes, but for the most part, kids were off limits. Even to the desperate people on the streets.
“I was thirteen when I was first attacked by a kid not much older than me. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. At the time, Iwas taking shelter beneath a bridge with a few other kids my age, runaways mostly. Foster kids forgotten by the system. I got no warning. No time to think about what was happening. No training. He just came at me. A large knife in his hand, hacking and slicing. When I look back at it now, his moves, like mine, were sloppy. Untrained. But to a thirteen-year-old boy, he looked like an assassin.”
“Why would he do that?” I question, bolstering myself up on my elbow so I can see him better. “Did you know him?”
Matthias shakes his head. “No,” he sighs with a small shake of his head. “I’d never seen him before. I managed to catch him off guard. Barely. The knife went skittering. Somehow, I managed to pick it up, and the next thing I know, he impaled himself on it. He ran right at it. No stopping. I remember standing there, knife in my hand, blood drenching the handle, and the last thing he did is cup my face and say, ‘I didn’t want this brat. I’m sorry.’”
Brat.
