“It is.” She breathes out, long and slowly. “But I will still tell you, if you want to know.”
I take a minute to digest her offer and eventually nod. If it will help me understand my uncle’s extreme feelings toward Matteo, I want to hear what she has to say. “Okay, I want to know.”
“I didn’t expect that I’d ever be telling you this,” Aunt Irina begins, suddenly looking more nervous than I’ve ever seen her in the past. “It’s not something that very many people know. But what happened to you, something very similar happened to me when I was nineteen. It’s how I met your uncle, actually. He found me, and he’s taken care of me since then.”
My heart sinks, and I hope I’ve misheard her. “W-what?”
“Three men broke into my hotel room—this place I was living in for a week while working a runway show. It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep when they started. It…I don’t want to downplay what happened by saying it wasn’t as brutal as what happened to you, but it was different. They didn’t cut me with knives, or burn me with lighters, but they hit me hard enough to break a few bones and litter me with bruises.”
My stomach drops, my arms curling around my middle on instinct. It’s like I can feel my scars flare, being reminded of them. Cuts, burns, bruises, it’s all too familiar, but I can’t ask her to stop. I have to hear what she has to say.
“The sexual assault was the most torturous part for me. It lasted hours and I felt like a wooden statue by the time they finished. I stopped begging for them to stop halfway through, knowing it was useless. They didn’t care how much I was crying, they wanted my tears. They weren’t hurting me because someone paid them to punish me, or to film me and send the footage as a punishment for someone else with my pain. They were doing it because they wanted to, because I was beautiful and they wanted to make me feel ugly.”
My chest feels uncomfortably warm as I digest her words, and my fingers start to feel tingly, like they would if I were going to have a panic attack. But I don’t feel a rush of anxiety, all I feel is sick.
“I…I wanted to talk to you about this when you were first recovering. I debated with myself constantly on whether it would be helping or hurting to confide in you. I wanted to let you know you weren’t alone, that I understood some of your pain, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. We were both victims of something terrible, but terribly unique all the same. I’ll never truly understand your pain, and you’ll never understand mine.”
Aunt Irina clears her throat, trying to unclog the emotion rising up.
“I was older than you when it happened to me. I wasn’t almost killed, even though it may have felt like it. And I didn’t need nearly as much time to recover. I didn’t want you to hear that I fell in love with your uncle only four months after he found me and got me the help I needed. I didn’t want you to think that because I was able to heal quickly, that your timeline was wrong or bad in some way. You were so young, and in so much pain…but I had your Uncle Lev with me, and he made me feel like I was never going to be hurt again.”
You were young too,I want to point out, but I don’t.
“Did you ever want to die?” I ask, voice barely above a whisper. “After it happened? Did you wish that they would have just killed you to make it stop?”
“Oh,solnyshka.” My aunt lifts our connected hands and kisses the top of mine. “Not as badly as you did. I never tried to make it happen, but I wished for death that night, so that the pain would end. I know four years may not seem like much of a difference in age, but at almost twenty, my brain was operating differently than yours. I was angry, more than I was sad. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of bringing me to end my life. I wanted to watch your uncle end theirs instead, and I did.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I rasp, still processing the story. “I think you were right in waiting to. I don’t know how I would have handled this information three years ago.”
“Well, now that you do know, I hope you can better understand your uncle. He’s so protective of you, and he’s worried about anything ever hurting you again. I know that deep down he knows Matteo isn’t a bad man, but he loves you so much that he’s not being rational. It’s not an excuse for his actions today, but it’s a reason that may make you eventually forgive him.”
I nod almost numbly, thinking hard.
I might hate what my uncle just did, but I don’t hatehim.
And after how I reacted today, I don’t think he’ll be touching Matteo ever again.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Matteo
Anton tosses a frosty green bag of peas across the kitchen counter, a dull slap sounding as they land right in front of me. He doesn’t say a word, but he sighs and puts his hands on the counter, using his connection to it to lean forward as he exhales.
“Sure you don’t want to get a swing in too?” I ask, pressing the bag of frozen vegetables to my face. The bite of cold feels sharp, but good against the pain in my jaw. “I won’t tell her if you do.”
Anton narrows his dark eyes at me, more assessing than aggressive. “I would have broken into your little mansion and beat your face in three nights ago if I thought you needed to be hit for kissing my daughter.”
“Heard about that, did you?” I ask with a wince.
I was sure he must have. He had guards and staff all around his house that night, and I knew a security camera could have caught us on tape. But when he didn’t confront me that night,or even the next day, I assumed he either didn’t know, or was in denial that he did know.
He grunts. “I know everything that happens in my house.”
I nod, shifting the frozen bag on my jawline. “So the fact that someone has been around us every day since it happened, not a coincidence, yeah?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Well, that answers that.
