Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145729 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145729 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“You took what you heard out of context. You don’t know the entire story.”
“Then tell it to me,” she invited. “And let Bastien go.”
“He’s safe enough. He’ll get loose but it will take him a while before he can make his way to a phone to call for help. I imagine his girlfriend has already called for help, but they won’t find him so easily. We’ve got time to prepare.”
She threw herself into a chair, very conscious of the fact that she wasn’t wearing underwear. She’d been with Joshua so many times, she felt him inside her. She felt his hands on her. She tasted him in her mouth. To look at Sasha, the man who was supposed to be her husband, made her feel guilt and shame, even though he’d tried to kill her by planting a bomb in her car.
“When did you know you were leopard?” he asked. He took a bottle of water from Dmitri and handed it to her. Light was streaking through the windows, the outside still gray with fog. “That was a shock.”
“It was a shock when I smelled my husband’s scent in the car just before it blew up,” she countered.
He whirled around. “You think I planted that bomb?”
“Sasha, even my leopard smelled your scent. It wasn’t just me.” She tried – and failed – to keep the hurt out of her voice. To have time to regain her composure, she took a drink of water, allowing it to slip down her parched throat.
“I was there, in the car. I worried that he would try it. I was pulled from the car and taken physically into the house. There was a fight between me and the men my father had restraining me. He sat in a chair with a glass of bourbon in his hand and watched while they beat me. It was a lesson, he said, I had to learn to be strong. He didn’t want a weak son, and you made me weak.”
It was impossible to miss the ring of truth in his voice, and more, the behavior was so Nikita. He always acted a little detached and superior to everyone else. A surge of hope swept through her. Sasha, her Sasha, hadn’t been the one to try to kill her.
“Tell me the entire story, Sasha. I’m a little lost.”
He set his water bottle on the mantel and turned completely toward her so she could see his face. “My father’s world is one of violence and revenge. There can be no loyalty to a woman, especially not one’s wife.”
Her heart jumped and then accelerated. He was telling her essentially what Joshua had revealed about Nikita Bogomolov.
“He killed my mother when I was ten. He made me watch as he beat her to death. He said no member of our family would ever put a woman first. Those kinds of women were to be fucked and then killed. He liked to say that.”
She knew. She’d heard him. “What did he mean by ‘those kinds’? I heard him say that about me and I thought…”
“He meant every woman. Every woman, Sonia. He didn’t single you out because of where you came from. He singled you out because you were too important to me. Your father betrayed him, and that isn’t tolerated. The penalty for stealing or really any infraction is death for the entire family. Nikita enjoyed making a statement. Your mother had been keeping our house since you were a baby. You were a beautiful child, a ray of sunshine in a world of madness. So was your mother.”
She had always believed he thought that of her mother. He had spent a great deal of time talking to Valeria. She remembered him as a teenager, tall and handsome, his dark eyes flashing with smiles at her while she followed her mother from room to room.
He paced across the room. “Of course she would catch Nikita’s eye. He wanted her. When your father made such a terrible mistake, he ordered him tortured and killed. He went to Valeria and offered a proposition. She could live in our home permanently and sleep with him whenever and wherever he wanted to pay off Roberto’s debt, or he would kill both of you and be done with it. He made certain I was there. He wanted me to see how a woman would ‘whore’ herself out for her child or her own life. That was supposed to be another lesson, but I knew he did it so he could have Valeria.”
“How could you stand him? Stand being in the same room with him?”
“I went to your mother and told her I would always watch out for you, that I’d do anything it took. I told her to make the deal with my father, but add that you weren’t to know, that your childhood would be happy. Your mother took care of me after my father’s many, many lessons. Broken bones, cigarette burns. He liked watching his men beat me. She was always there for me.” He looked down at his hands. “Making sure you had a good childhood and remained alive was the only thing I could do for her. It was better than what I did for my own mother.”