No More Sweet Surrender

“You did.”

Her eyes streaked to his, and she swallowed hard. “You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

“How can you think this is safe, Ivan? You’re the least safe person I could possibly imagine—”

“I keep having to remind you that I am widely considered to be the greatest fighter of all time,” he said, cutting her off, his gaze intent on hers. “I still train every day with my brother, who did things so secret and so terrible in the Russian army that they dare not speak his name aloud. And I could beat him with my eyes closed.” He let that sink in. Then continued in the same quiet tone. “This is what I do. There is no power on this earth that can get to you through me, Miranda. Not one.”

She looked away, out across the vast living room toward the sea that glimmered through the glass walls on three sides. That deep, brooding Pacific blue. Ivan thought he’d lost her, and he couldn’t understand the way that felt, the things that surged in him, outraged and very nearly frantic at the very idea. He refused to accept that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t help her. That whatever had done this to her could best him, too.

He refused to think about all the reasons why he shouldn’t be reacting this way. About how he was supposed to be breaking her apart, not building her back up.

Breathe, he ordered himself, and it took a lifetime of training, of battles hard won, to simply do it. To let her gather herself, swipe her hair back from her face and then begin to speak, as if she was talking to the ocean and he wasn’t there at all.

“He beat all of us,” she said in a low voice. “My mother. My brother. Me. We all lived in terror of setting off one of his moods, of triggering one of his rages, and it didn’t occur to me until much later, when I escaped, that there was no behavior good enough to please him—that he couldn’t be pleased, ever. That he wanted to do the things he did, or he would have stopped. He didn’t stop. He never stopped.”

“Your father,” Ivan indicated when she didn’t, and wondered why he’d imagined that money protected anyone from anything. When people remained people, and bullies remained bullies. He should know. He’d fought so hard to get away from his uncle only to find the world was filled with monsters just like him.

She nodded jerkily, still staring out the windows, her pretty face haunted.

“He was the most physical man I knew,” she whispered. “He was so big. He broke things with his hands. And he was always touching me. My head, my back, my arms—little reminders when we were out in public. That no matter how many times he smiled in church or joked around while he was coaching my brother’s soccer games, he could turn on us in an instant. And he did.”

Ivan still didn’t speak. She turned to face him then, her dark eyes searching his face as if looking for something. Disbelief? Pity? He didn’t know, and so he only gazed back at her, knowing nothing showed on his face but calm, easy compassion, no matter how it killed him to stay so quiet when what he wanted to do was find whoever had done this to her, the man who should have loved her the most, and break him into pieces. With his own big hands.

“I had one date,” she told him, her voice a painful little whisper in the quiet room. “I was sixteen. I’d decided early on that there was only one way out of there, and I was determined to take it. I studied like a maniac. I skipped two grades in school. But there was this boy.” Her smile was so sad it made his heart twist hard in his chest. “We saw a movie the week after we graduated from high school. He drove me home in his car and then he kissed me. It was my first. I forgot myself completely.” She pressed her lips together, hugged her legs tighter to her torso. “And when I walked into the house, my father called me a whore and beat me up so badly I had to stay in bed for three weeks.”

Ivan couldn’t help the sound he made then. He shook his head when she looked at him, so very carefully, as if she was waiting for him to turn on her. Which, of course, she was. And you will in the end, won’t you? a small voice inside of him asked. If you keep to the plan... But he shoved that aside.