Page 129 of Cruel Kiss

And I want to hear it from his mouth. Like he promised me.

I've got the envelope in my hand and a bottle of wine.Calista Meadows,it says on the front. It's still sealed. If I wanted to, I could open it now and read it start to finish before he walks in the door. Maybe, back in the old days, that's what I would have done. But I was operating on a different mindset then.

Never trust.

Always verify.

Get the data first.

Never let yourself be surprised.

But I don't want it from the paper. I never did.

I want it fromhim. His face. His voice. My head is done deciding things about Ronan Akov. And my heart made up its mind a long time ago. So this? I wouldn't quite call it a "formality." But it's the last thing standing between us and the wide-open future.

I see his car pull up and park in the driveway. He climbs out, sees me waiting there, and frowns. "Cali? Everything okay?"

I set the envelope down at my side and pick up the bottle of wine I bought for exactly this, uncork it, and pour some out in the two glasses. "Come sit and drink with me," I call out to him.

It's time to hear the final data point.

38

CALI

Ronan sits down beside me on the step. He takes the glass I hand him but doesn't drink from it. He just holds it and looks at the wine.

"You want the story," he guesses.

I nod. "Yes."

"You had the paper the whole time." He nods at the envelope by my hip. "You could have read it weeks ago."

"I didn't want it from the paper. I want it fromyou."

He sets his glass down on the step between his feet. For a long while, he doesn't say anything. The street is quiet tonight. A car goes by at the end of the block and then it's just us and the wind in the trees.

"My father was a big man," he says. "And he contained multitudes." He rubs his thumb along the rim of the glass. "You never knew which Igor you'd get in any given moment. Some nights, he was fine. Charming, even. Bought toys, told jokes. Other nights, the glass."

"Thrown at your mother, you mean," I say.

He nods, eyes distant. "He never hit her where it showed. That was his gift to her, I suppose. His version of mercy. He'd take a glass and throw it against the wall next to her head. Close enough that she'd feel the pieces. Then he'd tower over her while she got down on her hands and knees and swept it up. He'd make her apologize for the mess." His jaw grinds. "For the messhemade. And she'd do it. Every time. She'd say sorry and clean it up."

I don't say anything. I've learned by now that he needs the quiet to keep going.

"By the time I was fifteen, there was almost nothing left of her. She'd made herself so small trying to survive him that she just—" He opens his hand. "There was nothing there anymore. She'd stopped eating much. She'd stopped talking, except to apologize. She used to sing when I was little. She stopped that, too."

He picks the glass back up and this time, he takes a drink. As if he needs the liquid courage to give him the strength to go back to those horrible days.

"The last night," he says, "he came home worse than usual. I don't even remember what set him off. Something at work. Money. It was always something stupid like that. And he started in on her at the kitchen table. The glass came out. He threw it and it went past her head and hit the cabinet, and she got down on her knees to clean it up, and he stood over her with another one in his hand." He stops. "And I saw her face while she was down there. She wasn't scared anymore. She'd gone somewhere else. She'd already left. She was just cleaning up glass because that's what her body knew how to do."

I put a hand to my mouth. "Ronan…"

"I don't remember deciding I'd kill him," he explains. "People think there's a moment where you decide. There wasn't. Not for me, at least. He raised the second glass, and I was behind him, and there was a lot of broken glass on the floor already, and I picked up the biggest piece, and—" He breathes out. "I put him in the ground that night. My mother watched me do it from her knees. She didn't scream. She didn't call for help. She just watched, and then she got up, and held me."

My throat is tight. "How did Pyotr find out?"

Ronan's face is streaked with tears. For his mother's sake, I'm sure. "She called him because he was the only one she trusted. He came in the middle of the night and he looked at what was in the kitchen. Then he looked at me, this skinny fifteen-year-old covered in his father's blood…" He shakes his head. "And he made a choice. He could have called Lev. He could have called any of my father's men, and they'd have put me in the marshes right beside him, because you don't kill thepakhanand live. That's the law." He twists the stem of the wine glass between his fingers, sending red liquid sloshing up the sides. "Instead, Pyotr told them Igor's heart gave out. He buried the truth so deep nobody found it for twenty years. Not for my sake—but for my mother's."