The air leaves me in a huff of disbelief, and carefully, I wrap my arms around her, gently enveloping Anika’s slight body.
“What’s wrong,topolina? Why are you crying?” I ask, giving Svetlana a baffled look over Anika’s head as I try not to think too hard about how good it feels to hold my wife again.
“Miko, I’m s-so s-sorry,” she sobs, burying her face against my chest.
Frowning, I stroke her cornsilk hair. “What could you possibly have to apologize for?” I ask. “I came to apologize to you.”
Anika shakes her head so violently, I’m worried she might do damage to her neck, and her arms tighten around my waist as she continues to hide her face.
“Anika, look at me,” I plead, desperate for a window into what she’s thinking.
She sniffles, pulling back enough to wipe the tears from her cheeks, then she looks nervously up at me.
Relief washes through me as soon as our eyes meet, and I sigh as I run the backs of my knuckles over her tear-stained cheeks. “Talk to me,” I plead.
“I’m sorry I lost my mind,” she breathes, a hiccup racking her body and cutting her last word short. “I know I’m broken,” she adds, the tears beginning to flow once more as she tries to explain herself.
Heart torn to shreds, I cradle her face in my palm and try to dry her tears with my thumb, but for every one I catch, another takes its place, racing down to her chin. “Shh, don’t say that. You’renotbroken,” I insist, trying to comfort her. “You did nothing wrong. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I wasn’t being as careful as I should have been. I got caught up in the moment and wasn’t thinking. But that’s no excuse. I just didn’t realize…”
I swallow hard as the horrible truth threatens to strangle me. A truth so ugly, I wouldn’t even let myself consider it before. But after what happened last night, I know deep in my gut that it’s true.
Pyotr didn’t just hit Anika.
That monster raped her.
God only knows how many times.
And my inability to face that cold hard truth is why I failed her so completely.
“I’m sorry, Anika. God, I’m so, so sorry,” I breathe, my chest aching with the weight of my remorse—remorse for what I did, remorse for what happened to her, remorse that she had no one to shield her from such a horrible, despicable fate.
Pyotr gave an oath.
He swore to love and protect her, and he violated that promise in every way imaginable.
The delicate fingers that wrap around my hand pull me from my dark thoughts, and I look deep into Anika’s soft, fathomless blue eyes.
“You don’t need to apologize,” she promises. Her cheeks color as she drops her gaze, as if she’s embarrassed to say what she’s thinking. “I liked what you were doing,” she whispers, her blush intensifying. Then her eyes flick back up to meet mine. “Really I did. I just—I think because you smelled like whiskey, and then…”
She casts a shy glance over her shoulder in Svetlana’s direction, but to her credit, the old woman’s doing an impressive job of looking like she can’t hear us.
“When you pinned my hands above my head…”
I nod, reliving that horrible miscalculation with fresh shame as I remember how suddenly her attitude changed.
“I think I got stuck in a memory or something. I don’t know. I saw Pyotr’s face, and I thought you were him—” She swallowshard, a haunted expression on her face as she turns her head to look off into the middle distance. “I panicked.”
“I get it,” I rasp. “And I swear to you, if you give me another chance, I won’t ever let that happen again.”
Anika smiles up at me sadly. “You can’t promise that. I mean, how could you possibly know what might trigger me whenIdidn’t even know that might happen? I mean, maybe none of it would have been a problem if I hadn’t gotten so worked up about my conversation with Sora?—”
“What conversation?” I ask, my stomach sinking once again as I recall the way Leo’s wife was avoiding my eye last night.
Anika pales slightly, as if she can sense the warning in my tone. Her eyes search my face, and she bites down on her lip, showing off that adorable gap between her teeth.
“Anika,” I press, my temper rising.
If Sora said something that Anika doesn’t want to tell me, it must have been bad—bad enough to make Anika, subconsciously or not, place me in the same category as her abusive former husband.
