Page 79 of Wicked Mafia Beast
"Kon." My name breaks in half on her tongue.
"I'm telling you this because you need to understand." I tilt her chin up, forcing her to meet my eyes. Hers are swimming, the blue refracted through tears, but she doesn't look away. "When I saw the intel on your uncle's trafficking operation, when I read what he did to those women, what he planned to do to you, it wasn't strategy that made me volunteer at that auction. It wasn't the Syndicate's mission or Rafael's orders or the tactical advantage of acquiring an intelligence asset."
My thumb brushes a tear from her cheek. "It was a twelve-year-old boy who swore that if he ever had the power to stop it, he would. Every time. Without hesitation. Without mercy."
"That's why you reacted the way you did." Her voice is raw, barely above a whisper. "In the kitchen, when I told you about the trafficking. Your hands, your breathing. I saw it but I didn't understand."
"Now you understand."
"Does Rafael know? About Volkov?"
"He knows I was held. He knows the conditions were severe. He's the one who found me. Half-dead, feral, barely human. He didn't ask for details and I didn't offer them."
"So no one knows the full story of you being raped? What you just told me?"
"No one alive."
She's quiet for a long time, her fingers resuming their slow trace of the wire on my arm. Following each loop, each twist, each thorn rendered in ink over the ridges of old pain.
"You survived all of that," she finally says, her voice steadier now, grounded by an anger that isn't directed at me, "and you still grow roses on your roof and look for the beauty in life."
"Life after pain." I press my lips to her forehead. "Beauty born from suffering."
"I think I understand that now." She lifts her head and looks at me with those blue eyes, swollen and red and more beautiful than anything I've ever seen. "More than I want to."
She kisses me. Soft, sweet, unhurried. A kiss that acknowledges everything we've survived and everything we've just given each other.
She falls asleep in my arms. I stay awake. Watching her breathe. Listening to the steady rhythm that has become the most important sound in my world.
She chose me. Despite every reason she has to walk out that door and never look back.
She chose me.
I don't know what I did to deserve this, but I'm going to spend the rest of my life earning it anyway.
Dawn breaks for the second time since she found the files. A full cycle. Destruction to reconstruction. Ashes to the first green shoots pushing through.
She stirs against my chest. Opens her eyes.
"I'm still here." She says it quietly, her blue eyes searching mine, the swollen redness fading but the vulnerability still raw and open in a way she'd never allow if she were fully awake. Her fingers find the edge of the sheet and twist it, a nervous habit she doesn't know I've cataloged.
"You're still here."
"I might be here for a while." The corner of her mouth tugs upward. Her hand releases the sheet and reaches for mine, her fingertips brushing across my knuckles, tracing the scars there with a tenderness that tightens my throat.
"I'm counting on it." My voice comes out rougher than I intend, the accent thick, the words heavy with everything I can't say and everything I've already said.
She smiles. Small and real, the curve of her lips reaching her eyes for the first time since the folder shattered everything between us. The morning light catches the freckles scattered across her nose and for one breath she looks like the woman I first saw at that auction, fierce and unbroken, except now I know every fracture hidden beneath the surface and I love her more for each one.
Whatever this is between us, it's real now. No more deals. No more secrets. Just us and whatever comes next.
But deep in my gut, coiled beneath the warmth of her hand on mine and the sunlight pooling across our tangled sheets, a restless instinct gnaws at me. The same instinct that has kept me alive for forty-four years. The one that whispers in the dark when things are too still, too quiet, too good.
I'm not done fighting for this woman. And the fight that's coming will be nothing like the ones we've survived so far.
Fifteen
Onyx
