Page 31 of Vienna Bliss

“You never asked.” Alena watched him in her peripheral vision.

“Alena, how did you injure your knee?”

“I fell. Though a floor, actually.”

“Through a floor?” His brows went up.

Alena made herself comfortable. The urge to confront him, the cold anger, everything she’d been thinking and feeling just moments ago had faded. It was as if sitting here on the floor with him, they were once more in a stolen moment, a place where the rest of the world didn’t exist. She’d felt the same thing that night when she’d slept in his bed back in Moldova.

“I was a teenager. I was living—secretly—in the attic of this school. It was actually an old mansion that had been turned into a charter school. One day I walked in—I looked like a student after all, and I stayed.”

“This is when you had no home. No one looking after you.”

“Yes.”

Alexander’s hands flexed, fingers spread wide then curling into fists. She watched his hands, but she didn’t know what that meant, didn’t know what meaning she could, or should, glean from that little movement.

“Anyway, I was living up in the attic. It was actually perfect. They hadn’t really remodeled the place above the first floor, and since it was a house, there were full bathrooms, with showers, especially on the second floor.”

“Ah.” Alexander nodded as if he understood, though of course the billionaire I-was-raised-to-be-a-CEO had no idea—

Alena forced herself to stop that thought, because it was both dismissive, and wrong. He may not have ever experienced homelessness, but he had problems, issues—everyone did. And he was emotionally thoughtful and deeply empathetic. It was why he was so worried about her emotional and mental state. It was why he feared his own sexual sadism—precisely because he could anticipate and empathize as to what his actions could make another person feel.

“I’d shower at night, and it would dry out before anyone got there the next morning, plus people rarely came up to that floor. There were some offices, but the place only had stairs, so mostly everything was on the first floor.”

“Why couldn’t you live in one of the rooms?”

“Too risky. Plus I wanted my own space. I started to create a little apartment for myself up there in the attic.

“I put plastic, well, garbage bags I cut open—down over the fiberglass insulation. I figured out really fast that you couldn’t touch that stuff without getting itchy splinters. Do you use fiberglass insulation? The pink stuff?”

“I have no idea.”

She was tempted to make a little rich boy joke, but her earlier realization about his empathy was too fresh.

“The attic didn’t have a real floor, just the wooden frame and the drywall that was the ceiling of the floor below, all of it covered by fiberglass. One day I wasn’t paying enough attention, and though I’d walked through there a hundred, two hundred times, and I knew where to put my feet to make sure I was stepping on wood, that day I forgot.”

“I’m surprised you weighed enough to break through.”

“I heard a crack, sort of felt it give, and thought I’d be okay. I froze, waiting, which was the exact wrong thing to do, because if I’d grabbed on to something, or tried to step up onto the joist I’d missed the first time, I wouldn’t have fallen. But I froze, and a few seconds later it gave way. I fell through the ceiling into one of the bathrooms. I went feet first. I actually landed on my feet, in the tub, but it had a curved bottom. My foot went back, my upper body went forward, and this knee hit the side.” She tapped it.

He winced.

“Oh, it gets worse,” she assured him.

“Worse than falling through a ceiling and breaking your knee?”

“I didn’t just break my knee. I severely hyperextended it. Basically my knee bent the wrong way, snapping my kneecap, putting stress fractures on my leg bones, and tearing up my ACL. It was so messed up when I got into the hospital they actually had to go in from the back, not the front like they normally would.”

Alena carefully shifted to show off the side and back of her leg where the scar was, instead of down the front where anyone who’d had a knee replacement might have a scar.

“Thinking about that makes me feel physically ill,” Alexander said grimly.

“Apparently the only other time my surgeon had seen it was when a soccer player had taken another player’s foot directly to the knee.”

“The mental visuals are…” Again he grimaced.

“Here’s the really gross part.”