“Hey.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” he says sheepishly. I love that he’s trying to make me feel better, but honestly, there’s nothing Rafael could say that would bother me. Maybe a normal person would be hurt, but I’m not a normal girl. Nowhere near.
“I’ll walk you back to the house.”
I wake up to the brush of rough fingers over my arm. Goosebumps erupt over my skin, and I blink my eyes open. I can’t see anything in the darkness, but I instinctively sense Rafael simply by the fact that I don’t feel threatened. Rolling over, I seek out his warmth, like a homing beacon calling me to him.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper, groggily.
His large hand slides over my waist. “I told you, keeping the monsters away.” That’s what he said last night.
“You don’t have to—“
“Shh, go to sleep, avecita.” He pulls me closer, and I press my face into his throat, inhaling the distinct smell of him. Citrus, cigars, and warmth like the smell of the desert sand under a red-hot sun.
“I’m sorry I worried you,” I say into the darkness.
His chest rises on a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry I said you were dressed like a whore.”
“I am a whore, Rafael.”
His body tenses beneath me. “What have I told you about saying that?” When I don’t respond, he strokes a hand over my hair. “Sleep, Avecita.”
After a few minutes in the silence of night, his breaths fall even. The slow beat of his heart is a soothing rhythm that lulls me to sleep. And when I close my eyes and drift away, the nightmares don’t come, as though he can physically protect me from my own demons.
When I wake up in the morning, he’s gone, but left on the pillow is a huge blood-red rose, freshly cut from the garden. A gift. I pick it up, and the thorns slice open my skin. Some may take it for a romantic notion, but it’s more than that. I love the roses, but I also love how deceptively pretty they are while donning such sharp thorns. A contradiction. Beautifully strong.
He left it for me, and it makes me smile. It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever given me.
18
Rafael
I swipe my hand down my face as I make my way up my front steps of the house. The sun is already dropping below the horizon. My warehouse is a fucking shambles because, of course, when Dominges’ mercenaries went for Anna, they blew up the warehouse to distract me. This is the cartel. It happens, and we’re ready for it. I’m moving everything to a more secure location, but it takes work, planning. I’d usually just leave Samuel to deal with it all, but when I woke up next to Anna this morning, her soft breaths on my skin and my dick plastered against the front of my boxers, I needed to get out of the house. On top of that shit in the garden last night…she’s making me unhinged, and I can’t fucking afford to be.
The front door swings open and Carlos walks out. “Boss.” He moves past me, heading down the steps. “I have some business in town.” With Carlos that could be anything from gangs to one of his baby-mamas. I open my mouth to speak, but he cuts me off. “Anna is in the games room with my brother.” A smug grin pulls at his lips, and I glare at him. Laughter follows him as he rounds the corner of the house towards his bike. Prick.
I go straight to my office and pour a drink. The liquor burns as it makes its way down my throat and settles in my gut. Tension clings to me like a second skin. My mind flits between business, Anna, Dominges, Nero and back again. There’s too much I don’t know, and too much that’s seemingly very hard to find out. Carlos has been looking for information on her for weeks, and he can’t find shit. Anna Vasiliev, orphaned at the age of five, placed in an orphanage with her sister, Una Vasiliev. Both of the girls’ records cut off when they’re thirteen, assumedly at the point where they were both sold. It’s as though they just ceased to exist from that point on. I suppose in essence, Anna doesn’t really exist, not in the real world. It’s why girls like her are so easy to take—they just slip under the radar.
The problem I have is that I don’t even know who or what she is, and neither does she. And yet the little warrior has this power over me. Try as I might to fight it, I can’t, and she’s fast becoming a pretty little distraction. I want to know every sordid detail, every dark secret, and every sad little dream she has. I want to break her, crack that hard shell wide open and expose all the horrors beneath just so I can put her back together again. And all of it pisses me off because it makes me weak.