Fire Bound (Sea Haven/Sisters of the Heart 5)

"How could he do this?"

Her voice was low. Shaking. He wasn't certain whether the shaking was from anger or shock. He stayed quiet, knowing there was no answer to such treachery.

"His own brother. He ordered the hit on his own brother. On my mother. They loved him. I loved him." A shudder went through her body. She turned her head to look over her shoulder at him.

His heart nearly stopped. Her eyes were wet. Liquid. As blue as the deepest sea. The tips of her lashes were wet. Spiky. He didn't think tears could affect him, but his gut knotted and his heart stuttered at the sight of her liquid blue eyes. He wanted to go into her uncle's room and cut his lying, deceitful throat.

"Do you have any idea how many times I worried about his health? I was just a child and terrified I'd lose him. He'd tell me he had to go into his rooms and be alone. He wouldn't call the doctor, no matter how much I begged him to. He would be there for two weeks or more at a time. Once it was a month. I cried every night, afraid he would die, my only living relative. Arturo would be here with me..." Her voice trailed off. She turned her head back. "Arturo." She whispered the name.

He was a man of action. He'd always been a man of patience, but her pain was so deep he wanted to strike out. He couldn't take out her uncle, not yet, but Arturo was an altogether different proposition. His hands were steady as he pulled the brush through her hair, one arm around her waist, holding her to him.

"I love him too," she said. "Tio Luigi and Arturo. I love them both. I thought they loved me. I don't have..." She broke off abruptly.

"You do, Giacinta," Casimir said. "You have your sisters. They aren't blood relations, but they may as well be. They love you. My brothers, on that farm, they love you. They would never have taken the chance of sending for me if they didn't want you protected at all times. If you weren't family to them."

She shook her head. "They don't know me. None of them know what I am. What Tio Luigi shaped me into. I'm a killer. If my sisters knew..."

"They would still love you, golubushka. You're the same person who threw in with them. You went to the counseling sessions with them and built a home with them. They would understand and help you through this. Look what their men are."

She shook her head. He kept brushing her hair, searching his mind for the right words, hoping to find something - anything - to comfort her.

"Think about each of them. Who they are. What they've gone through. Then you can tell me they wouldn't understand."

She took a deep breath. He knew she was trying to stop the tears from falling. He didn't want that. She needed to cry, to share that with him. He put the brush down and turned her in his arms. She was reluctant, her body stiff, but he was strong and she wasn't in any shape to put up a fight. He drew her onto his lap and held her close until she dropped her head on his shoulder in defeat.

"You're right," she said. A small shudder went through her body. Her voice was strangling on tears. "They'd accept me."

"And love you. That won't ever change," he confirmed. "Not ever. Those women are your true family, Giacinta. And my brothers love you, and more than anyone else in the world, they would understand and accept you. How could they not? The same thing that happened to you, happened to us. The others might suspect, but Gavriil knows. No one ever fools Gavriil. He's the one who used the emergency drop to let me know you would be coming to Europe and he wanted protection for you."

Hot tears fell on his neck and bare shoulders. He tightened his arms. The last thing he wanted was for Lissa to pull away from him or her family. Betrayal could do that. Isolate and eat away at a person until there was nothing left. He wasn't going to have that for her.

He knew Luigi would have to kill Lissa after she took out the head of the Porcelli family. Aldo Porcelli would be the last target Luigi would give her and then he would have no other choice but to kill her. He had known all along, from the moment he had taken Lissa into his house when she was a small child, that he would have to kill her. The man was cold-blooded enough to kill his own brother and sister-in-law, take in their daughter and raise her to be a weapon for him, knowing all along he planned to get rid of her. He couldn't afford for her to put the pieces together because he knew if she did, she would come after him.

Casimir had been raised in a brutal school. No one had pretended to love him. There were no deceptions. He knew what was expected of him if he wanted to live and if he wanted to keep his brothers alive. Lissa had been raised in a home with people she thought loved her.

Casimir tightened his arms around her and dropped his head on the top of hers, wanting to surround her with comfort - with an emotion he didn't dare name. Emotions, for him, were deadly. It was never good to be vulnerable, and Lissa Piner made him very vulnerable. He understood his brothers now, their need to band together and protect their women. They'd found something to hold on to, and now he had that very thing in his arms.

She wept silently, and to him that was even more heartbreaking than if she'd screamed aloud. The tears were hot on his skin, and her body, in his arms, shook with the force of her grief, but she didn't make a sound. Not one single sound. He would have liked it better if she screamed out her pain at the depths of her uncle's betrayal. The soundless weeping was like an arrow piercing straight through his heart. Her heartbreak was too deep for anything but silent tears and made his resolve to make her uncle and Arturo pay all the more firm.

Lissa and Casimir had no safe place to go. They had no sanctuary. If they had even a small chance to get out of the mess they were in alive, they would have to trust each other implicitly. Rely on each other. Take each other's back. He had to convince Lissa that she could trust him.

He was practically a stranger to her. It would be human nature for her to pull away from him after her own flesh and blood betrayed her. He had to be very, very careful over the next few days to make certain she knew she could rely on him. Words wouldn't do it. He had to show her. She had to feel it. The only way he could guarantee her fidelity, absolute loyalty, was for her to see it for herself. There was only one real way.

They had a psychic connection. He'd established that through his mark on her. It would be uncomfortable and dangerous for her to see him. All of him. Know the terrible things he'd done. He would be taking a terrible risk, but if she could accept him with his bloody, vile past, she would know absolutely she belonged to him and he would aid her and guard her in anything she chose to do.

He took a deep breath, fear clawing at his gut. She lifted her tear-wet face, her eyes moving over him, seeing him. Seeing Casimir the man, not one of the many masks he wore. "What is it?"

7

Casimir studied Lissa's face. Not many women could weather a storm of silent weeping, have their heart ripped from their body, and still manage to look beautiful. She did. Her blue eyes remained steady on his, and he knew he had fallen hard and fast because of that look. She might be knocked down by the knowledge of the extent of her uncle's treachery, but she got back up. She would always stand back up and she would hold firm.

"What is it, Casimir?" she repeated.

He took a breath, knowing he was risking everything. "You need to know you can count on someone, malyshka. We're going to do this together. Beat them. All of them. Your enemies. My enemies. To do that you have to trust me."

She hesitated and then nodded. "I do."

Casimir shook his head. "You want to trust me, Giacinta, but how can you when you've known nothing but betrayal? You have to have doubts whether you want to have them or not. I can put your doubts to rest but in doing so, you will see Casimir. The real man. The killer."

She shook her head. "That isn't the real man."

"It is. I am what they made me. I can't separate the two. I lied to myself for a lot of years telling myself that it was the role I played - those men were killers - not me. But all of those roles, they were still me." He shackled her wrist with gentle fingers and turned her hand over, palm up. "Through this mark, you can see into my mind. Everything

. I won't be able to hide from you. You will see that you will never have to have a single doubt about my loyalty to you. I can give you that. But you'll also see all of me, and I'm afraid that will terrify you. Repulse you even. I'm not a good man."

Her gaze searched his and he didn't flinch. Didn't look away from her. He was willing to strip himself bare for her. For this one woman, he would be whatever she needed. Do whatever she needed. There would never be another in his world. He waited for the verdict. His mouth had gone dry and blood thundered in his ears. He had faced death a million times and it had never felt like this.

"You'd do that for me?"

It was her tone more than her question that gave away the fact that she realized the enormity of what he offered. Holding her gaze, he nodded slowly. "I think it's necessary, Giacinta, for both of us. Do I want you to see inside of me? Hell no. Hell no. But you have to know, not think, that you can count on me. We have to be closer than any two people have ever been. I'm willing to risk everything for a chance at keeping you. A few days of you thinking about what your uncle did and your trust factor is going to hit zero. I don't want to be a casualty of the inevitable."

"There's a part of me that wants to pack up and run home to hide on the farm," Lissa admitted. She leaned into him and rubbed her forehead against his shoulder. "But I can't do that. I don't have the kind of personality that would ever allow me not to know the truth and then do something about it. I can't leave the Sorbacovs' threat hanging over us either, not when I know I have the best chance of anyone of getting close to them. As for my uncle and Arturo, if they really were part of the murders of my parents and all the people who worked for us, then I would never be able to live with myself if I didn't do something about that as well."

"Malyshka, you have to think hard about that. I'm willing to take them out, but if circumstances dictate otherwise, could you do it? You have to know that before you put yourself in harm's way."

She didn't answer right away. She kept her head down, pressed against his shoulder so he could no longer look into her eyes. He ran his hands down her back, along her spine, down to the curve of her waist and the indentation at the small of her back. The longer he spent in her company, the stronger he felt the bond between them.

"I've been going over my childhood, so many things that didn't make sense that add up now." She lifted her head and met his gaze.

His belly knotted. His arms tightened, trying to surround her with his strength. He wanted to shelter her next to his heart, the feeling of tenderness nearly overwhelming him. Simultaneously, he wanted to rip out her uncle's heart and feed it to him. He wouldn't mind spending a few hours making the man's life unbearable until he begged for death. The two emotions warred with each other, and he worried that she would see that in him as well.

"He doesn't have multiple sclerosis. That's why he wouldn't allow my father to talk to his doctor, or for me to ever see him ill. He went into his wing of the house and left to go to his family. I had to study night and day. Languages, reading maps, everything that could possibly help me along with my regular studies. Every type of weapons training and styles of martial arts, boxing and street fighting. I didn't play with dolls or watch television, not unless it was a training exercise. All the while, he ranted about going after those responsible and how no law would ever bring them to justice. All along I thought I was the patient one, insisting we go slow and make everything look like an accident, but looking back at the conversations, he led me in that direction."

Casimir nodded. He was certain her uncle had the patience to carry out a long-term plan to reach his ultimate goal, which was to be the sole power of both families. Luigi wouldn't have been able to take over both families immediately. If Aldo Porcelli and his father had been killed right away, even his wife would have suspected him. By slowly reducing the old guard, and then going after the men in charge, Luigi had positioned himself, over time, to be the natural choice for head of the family. He would have had to plant the necessary lies in his niece's mind in order to make her think it was all her own idea.

"He sometimes sent me to boarding schools. Not for very long, but he said it was to gain an insight into other people. It never made sense to me. I was with other children. Gaining insights to how a child's mind worked didn't seem as if it was going to help me later down the road. Of course he was with his family during those times. It was his idea that I go to the States. Again, he needed me out of the way."

"You're intelligent, Giacinta. He couldn't take the chance that you might see or hear something he didn't want you to. You trusted him implicitly, but he still didn't dare chance it."

She took a deep breath and her gaze dropped to his throat. "Maybe you should get clear of all of this, Casimir. I have to see it through. I started something a long time ago, and I'm going to finish it."

He shook his head, his hand sliding up her back, beneath her long hair to curl around the nape of her neck. "Look at me, golubushka." He waited until she lifted her gaze back to his. "I'm not going anywhere. We're in this together. You may not want me right now, or trust me, but you need me. You're mine, and I'm going to protect you and help you through this. The best way to do that is to show you who and what I am. You'll see into my mind. I won't be able to hide from you. Not anything. You have to be able to count on at least one person right now. Your sisters are a long way away, so you've got me. Only me. And, Giacinta, I'm more than up for whatever has to be done."

He was looking forward to it. No job had ever been personal for him. This was. Still, he was a man of control. He was fire inside. He always had been, but he could twist those flames to be whatever he needed. He'd learned restraint from the many lessons of his youth. He was able to use the fire to his advantage, keeping it smoldering and under control all these years. The first loss of control he'd experienced since the days of his boyhood had been this night with Lissa in his bed.

Once more he took her wrist and turned her palm up to him, laying it over his bare thigh. He didn't wait for consent. He didn't want her to struggle with her decision. She was trying to protect him, and he didn't need that from her. He needed trust. He turned up his own palm and took her other hand and pressed her thumb hard into the exact center, then repeated the action with his own thumb on her upturned palm.

At once the connection arced through both of them, much like an electrical current. The sizzle started in their palms and forked outward, spreading along pathways, nerve endings, straight toward their brains. He felt her in his mind and deliberately, he forced himself to open to her, to allow her access to his memories, to everything he was, both good and bad. He wanted her always. He didn't hide that from her. He wanted a home and a family with her. He wanted everything with her, and he was ruthless enough to take it. To protect it. He didn't try to keep that from her either.

His past flooded her mind. Memories of his mother and father. He'd been so young, but he'd been traumatized, just as she'd been, by their ugly deaths. He'd been ripped from his brothers, so frightened, just a young boy, beaten and threatened, humiliated and tortured to keep him off-balance and afraid of those who held power over him. Unashamed, he left himself open for her to see everything.

Casimir Prakenskii, like his brothers, had been forged in the fires of hell. Lissa wanted to weep for the young boy - for all of them. She'd suffered trauma when her parents and those she loved had been murdered, but her torment had been swift and then over. Casimir's hadn't ended for years. He'd been caned, whipped, had electrical shock applied. He'd even been water-boarded.

Training sexually should have been at least pleasurable, but it was all about performance and control. If he failed to control his arousal, he was beaten severely. If the woman failed to arouse him, she was beaten. Sickened, Lissa nearly pulled her thumb away, but then his memories of work were there. Years of being alone. Lissa had never really felt completely alone, not like he did.

She saw the many roles he'd played in order to get close to his targets. He'd hunted with

great efficiency and patience. He'd refined his skills over the years, relentless in his pursuit and yet never hurrying or making a mistake. Consequently, he had a perfect record. He was sent out and didn't stop until the job was done. She couldn't help but admire his skills.

Still, along the way, with as many hits as he'd made, things had been bound to go wrong. He bore those scars. The worst were on his face and scalp and had come from a fellow student targeted because the man had switched sides. He'd begun working for the Russian mob, using his skills for monetary gain. The elder Sorbacov hadn't liked that.

Lissa held her breath as that particular memory unfolded and she saw the weapon the target had used to try to take Casimir's head off. The man had forged the blades, curving them to fit over a skull and face like a mask. He wielded it as a sword, slamming the cage of sharpened steel onto his victims in order to hold them in place for the kill. The more they struggled, the deeper the blades penetrated.

Casimir hadn't struggled. He'd allowed the assassin to pull him close and he'd struck with his own blade. It had taken longer to remove the mask of blades from his face and skull than it had to kill his opponent. Who had that kind of discipline? What would it take to be that man who could have his face and skull slashed to pieces, blood running everywhere, and calmly kill his attacker and remove the horrible device?

Then she was seeing past the roles, into Casimir, where he hid that last little piece of himself. He was loyal to a fault. He'd chosen her. His angel. He thought of her that way. His angel of justice. A sword honed for a good cause. He considered himself the darkest devil, a demon forged in the fires of hell. He had that fire burning in him, never to be put out. She shook her head at the way he looked at both of them.