Sevastyan could see the stark fear in her. Not only could he see it on her face, but he felt it pouring off of her in waves. She was terrified of that same fate. It was all making sense to him. It hurt that she would think that of him, but if her own father would do such a thing, why would he think she should trust a complete stranger, one she’d first seen at a sex club?
“He put me out of the house when I was seven because he wanted my room. He had several rooms for his women but it wasn’t enough and he wanted me out of the way. What was the difference between taking their passports and forcing them to work for nothing, and making them think they had to have sex and do whatever was asked of them? Because he did that. He never beat them and he always treated them the same, paid for educations, got them started in business, that sort of thing. If anything, he might have been slower to help the ones sleeping with him. But many of the women still felt as if they had no choice.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“After his death, not when I was a child.”
“Did you ever talk to him about it?”
“I tried once when I was talking about my mother and her medical history. He got very angry with me and denied that he ever forced any woman to sleep with him. He said he and my mother agreed to an open marriage and the arrangement wasn’t my business. That’s when he told me the clotting shots wouldn’t work and I wasn’t going to live long. He also told me to stop rescuing, that with the cameras now it was making things impossible to get in and out of countries without the poachers kn
owing we were coming. It was one long terrible argument. He died a couple of days later.”
“But you continue to insist on rescuing as many shifters as possible.” Sevastyan kept his voice very mild. He wanted to shift the conversation to what she was really doing, because something was going on that had nothing to do with what her father had been doing. He thought her father’s rescue operation had been used as a cover for her real operation.
“I can’t bring that many shifters in,” she denied. “Not if I want them legal.”
She wasn’t going to volunteer any information. She was too closed off. He was going to have to nudge her harder. Sevastyan sighed and shook his head. He draped himself casually against the opposite wall and let the silence stretch out between them. He knew each minute that went by, her anxiety rose. He let a good ten minutes pass.
“The problem with being tied to a man like me, baby, is you get it from both parts of me. The man raised in a lair with father who was a vor. That interrogator, trained to read everything around him. I had to pay attention to every detail so that nothing ever escaped me in Rolan’s territory as well as the territories in the surrounding lairs. You also have the dominant, who enjoys rope art. I have to be able to read every subtle nuance of my partner’s body. Every little tell of her body, her expression, her temperature, anything at all that changes. And then there’s Shturm. He’s Flamme’s mate. Animals, unlike humans, don’t lie to or deceive their mates. Put that all together and that makes it very difficult for you to hide anything from me for any length of time.”
She began to look alarmed. She was getting it. He went to her again and tipped up her face and took her mouth. His kiss was very gentle. Trying to keep it gentle was difficult when she was like kissing a flashfire, but he managed, because his woman deserved gentle. He trailed the pad of his thumb over her lower lip just once.
“Tell me what you’re doing, Flambé. I’m in a position to help you. I have resources all over the world. I won’t take over, I’ll just give you whatever you need. At some point, you’re going to have to trust someone. I want that someone to be me.”
He saw the very real struggle on her face. She wanted to believe him, but she had so much to lose if he wasn’t the man he had tried to show her he was.
She took a deep breath. “Get me out of the ropes, please, Sevastyan. If I’m going to take this chance, I’m going to have the courage myself without a crutch.”
He pulled her body against his, more so she couldn’t see his face than for any other reason. He wasn’t certain he could keep a mask when he’d been doing it his entire life. She had more courage than anyone he knew. The knot on her hands was a simple one. He had to be able to protect her by getting her hands loose if her circulation was cut off at any point or they had unexpected visitors. Once her hands were free, she put her arms around his neck as he worked through the knots.
Sevastyan lifted her into his arms and carried her to the wide armchair he found the most comfortable, settling there with her on his lap. She was trembling, not uncommon after she spent time in the ropes. He held her, rocking her gently, soothing her, letting her come back slowly, not pushing her to talk to him until she was ready.
Flambé snuggled into him and he pulled a blanket around her. Some models were hot when they came out of the ropes but Flambé always seemed cold, even after they had wild, crazy sex, with the exception of her leopard’s heat. He was never in a hurry when he had her in his arms. The fact that her body temperature was cool meant her female was resting as well.
Sevastyan couldn’t detect her nerve endings flaring up with the terrible burning that plagued Flambé, so he took advantage while he could, massaging her shoulders and arms and down her back, reveling in his ability to touch her freely without worrying that he might hurt her.
Eventually she began to rally, reaching for the water herself and sitting up on her own. She gave him a little half smile before she slipped off his lap and wrapped herself in the blanket, covering her body and taking the chair opposite his.
“This is hard for me to talk about, Sevastyan.”
“I know it is. I know it’s difficult to give anyone that level of trust, but I swear on my leopard, I won’t break faith with you, Flambé. Everything I’ve promised you, I meant.”
She was silent for so long he wasn’t positive she would be able to overcome her fears. “I started an underground system for shifter women to get away from abusive mates.” Flambé blurted it out all at once, no hedging.
Sevastyan had expected something like that, at least that she was attempting to set something up, but he still found her news shocking. He leaned toward her. “You have it up and running? You actually have a woman you’ve managed to hide from an abusive shifter?” He couldn’t keep the admiration from his voice.
Really? Who could do that? A woman could go to Drake Donovan and ask for his protection, but the leopard had the right to challenge Donovan to fight for her and the fight was to the death. Donovan had family and a lair. She could go to the head of her lair, but chances were good she would be told she had to go back to her mate. No one had ever been able to hide from one’s mate. A leopard could track their mate too easily.
“More than one. Several.”
His heart thudded. Now things were adding up much faster to him. “Franco Matherson. Tell me about him. Who is he really? Did he have a mate who ran from him?”
“Not him. He has a friend named Basil Andino. I brought Andino’s mate, Karisa, out about eighteen months ago, maybe a little longer. She was in bad shape. Basil isn’t a really nice man. He’d gone off with his friends thinking she was cowed and would stay put while he partied with other women. Karisa was pregnant, but she lost the babies because he beat her so badly. When he finally came home, he would have come home to lots of blood and clots and a big mess. It would have looked as if she might have died.”
“Did he know she was bleeding before he left? Possibly losing his children?” Sevastyan asked. He knew he sounded grim. He felt grim. He had friends he could reach out to. Basil Andino wasn’t going to be around much longer.
“He had to have.”