Rough Exile

“Yes, yes. Tell yourself it’s all a game, but I can see how things are progressing. The two of you will be together, and I’ll be what? Your bodyguard. Will the two of you pity me and sneak me into your bed?”

“You’re jealous?”

“Jealous. Such a childish word.” He exhaled, the breeze of it ruffling my hair. “Yes, I’m jealous. Is that what you want me to say? I don’t want you touching him, and I don’t want him touching you. You’re both mine, not each other’s, and yet I feel like there’s an axe waiting to fall on my neck.” He shook his head. “I can’t go from being everything to Ilya to nothing—from being your tormentor to your father-in-law’s thug. If you stay, you’ll marry him. If you go home, we’ll both lose you. Either way, in two days we’re leaving this island, and everything will change. Ilya will impress his father, you’ll make your choice, and I’ll probably get pulled back into Vas’s group of enforcers.”

He would? I put my forehead on his chest. “So then why are you saying you’re looking forward to getting back to your real life?”

“Because I’ve always known my life with Ilya would end. I try to convince myself I’m eager to go back to working my way up the ranks in Vas’s army.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m not a child out to prove myself anymore. I’m not angry and self-destructive the way I was. Hurting people—killing people—that’s not what I want to do anymore.”

Anymore?

He’d killed people.

I shivered. I’d suspected as much, after seeing what he’d done to the man in the park, but hearing him admit it so freely was shocking.

Should it have changed the way I felt about him? Yes. Maybe it did, but not the way it should have. It made me feel safer, which was ridiculous.

“Will Vas let you walk away?”

“I doubt it. And if anyone finds out what I’ve been doing to his son, he’ll put a bullet in my brain.” He sighed and rested his chin on my head, his shaggy beard tangling in my hair. “I knew this day was coming. It’s why I chose you for him. I thought if I was to lose him to someone, it would hurt less if it was to someone like you. And then you smiled at me for the first time, and I was besotted.”

He was making fun of me. This was the Russian idea of a joke, right?

His hand grazed my cheek, then cradled it. He brushed his mouth against mine. “Why is it easier to tell truths in darkness?”

My heart caught, forgetting to beat.

Was he cruel enough to say things like this to me as a prank?

“If you like me so much, why do you hurt me?”

He hummed quietly, the vibration moving from his mouth to mine, my heart picking it up as its rhythm.

“I hurt you because we both enjoy it.”

My mind whirled, too full of thoughts to have answers.

“This job destroyed my life, and now it’s my job to take the two of you to Moscow and destroy it again.” He sighed, then kissed me gently one last time. “Now enough with the womanly petulance. You still have things to learn.”