Page 80 of The Enemy Protector
“You were beaten and drunk.”
“Why did you disappear? Why didn’t you stay?” I stop myself before I say too much. Before I admit how many nights I lay awake thinking about him. Wondering who he was. Creating entire stories in my head about the mysterious man with the green-eyed snake.
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“You thought they would think it was you.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t want to cause you any trouble.”
“You saved me.”
I can’t explain what’s happening inside my chest. It feels like it’s blooming.
My actual hero. I had convinced myself he was a figment of my imagination.
But he’s real. He’s here.
“I don’t allow women to be raped, especially not at my club.”
“No.” I step away from the wall and toward him. “Don’t do that. Don’t minimize what you did. Those men were going to rape me. They were going to kill me. And you stopped them. You protected me when no one else did.”
I see something flash in his eyes. Pain? Regret?
That’s when something occurs to me. The police never found my attackers.
“What happened to them?” I ask. “The men who attacked me.”
“They’re dead.”
If he was someone else, I would have been surprised. But this is Sergei Sokolov. My husband.
“You killed them.”
“Yes.”
I should be horrified. Should be disgusted that I’m standing in a bedroom with a man who just admitted to murder.
But I’m not.
I’m relieved.
Those men deserved to die for what they tried to do to me. For what they probably did to other women before me.
“Good,” I say.
He looks surprised. “Good?”
“Yes. Good. They deserved it.”
I wait for guilt or horror to follow. It doesn't. Instead something I've been carrying for three years quietly puts itself down. Like a door I didn't know was open finally closing.
We stare at each other. The air between us feels charged. Electric.
“So you’ve been watching me since that night,” I say, working through the timeline. “Not just recently. For three years.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
