Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 89985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
I was always an easy target for my father’s wrath, and that hadn’t changed once in the last few years, not even with me running away. If anything, it had made him angrier. I had truly believed that today I was going to die.
He’d been so angry, and there had been no stopping him. Not that any of his soldiers or men had attempted to do so.
I was trying not to think about the baby. I’d not even known for sure I was pregnant and now I had lost it, and that saddened me. I didn’t want to lose my baby, any baby. The temptation to put my hand on my stomach was strong, but I held back. Ivan was a stranger. He didn’t need to see my weakness.
“You will be able to have more children,” Ivan said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I got the information on your father’s location too late. You were never meant to be harmed.”
“So, you and Peter knew exactly who I was?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And you planned this?”
“Yes.”
There was no sadness or regret. He just looked at me like it made him feel nothing. Tears filled my eyes as I let the experience wash over me, because the truth was, it had sucked, big time.
There wasn’t a single moment through any of this where it had felt good. All those times I thought Peter was a good man—a gentleman, charming—it had all been a lie.
“Why?” I asked. “Why go to those extremes? Why lie to me? What did I ever do to you?”
Ivan sat there in a chair and stared at me for what felt like the longest time. I didn’t even know if he heard me, but then, in slow movements, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
On a cheap piece of rope, dangling in the center, was a cross. I had won it at a fair that had come to town when I was a child. The woman behind the counter hadn’t liked my mom, who’d been irritated that I had won anything. When I won that cross, it had a metal chain, but halfway around the fair, it snapped. My mother didn’t care and she was only interested in getting another drink. While she’d been distracted at the bar, I ran back to the woman and asked what I could do to fix it.
She took a piece of black rope, tiny, the kind used for crafting, slid the cross onto the rope, tied it up, and slid it right over my neck. She told me if I was ever feeling scared or alone, or worried, then I was to hold onto the cross and know I was being taken care of. That someone out there did love me.
I kept that chain until five years ago, when I was at a hospital. My mother had been drinking again, but it had gotten bad, and resulted in me having no choice but to take her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. I’d been in the waiting room, and that was when I remembered the man before me. He looked colder now, scarier.
In the waiting room, Ivan Volkov had looked like a man ready to give up, ready for anyone to kill him.
“In my moment of darkness, of weakness, you came and sat with me,” Ivan said. “I know you remember it now. You could have left me alone. You could have ignored me the way everyone else intended to. You didn’t. You, Niamh, a young and slightly terrified woman, came to sit next to me. You offered me comfort when I needed it most.”
****
Ivan
Five Years Ago
She was gone.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
The pain was unlike anything I had ever imagined.
After everything I had done, this was the worst feeling in the world. This was helplessness. This was pain and torture mingled into one, because I couldn’t save her from this. I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t even stop it. There was nothing I could do.
I had a gun. A knife. There were drugs I could get.
It would be so easy to end it all and join her.
The world didn’t need another fucked-up monster. All I wanted to do was hurt people. To hurt anyone that had lived, while she had died.
Lost in my own world of pain and torture, I didn’t realize I had been seen until someone sat down beside me. I was about to lose my shit and scream at whoever had thought they could approach. Could I not have a moment’s peace to mourn? To kill myself? To plot the way I was going to die?
“Are you okay?” a feminine voice asked.
I was ready to growl at that voice, and I was just about to do that, when I turned and saw a sad smile looking back at me. She was young, late teens, possibly early twenties. I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen her before.