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His voice raises, but only a little. Still, it’s enough to shock me. “It matters because I could have hurt you. I did hurt you.”
My breath snags. I take a sip to wash it down, murmuring, “It wasn’t so bad. Just a bit unexpected, is all.” I glance at his hands where they sit in one balled fist on the table. Quietly, I explain, “You have quite large fingers.”
His lips quirk. “I would have been much gentler, far less crazed, if I had known.”
I frown as I study him. “You didn’t suspect?”
“I did,” he admits. “And then I thought of your age, and the choir boy at home, and I thought?—”
I stiffen. “Choir boy?”
His jaw clenches, a muscle there, jumping. “Yes, the boy-man you were flirting with before you were taken. Before you knew you were mine.”
“I wasn’t yours.”
“You were born mine, Ruby.”
I squirm uncomfortably. To mask my discomfort, I huff. “You’re impossible. How did you know about him?”
“My brother?—”
I interrupt, “The one who took me?”
“Ilya, yes. He looked into you for quite some time before he took you. There was a file. I have it.” He doesn’t look apologetic at all. “I also looked into your life, afterward, of course. Once I knew I was keeping you, I did my own research.”
“You looked into me?” I can’t help it, I’m utterly shocked. “As in, investigated my life?”
“As much of it as I could.” He watches the angry hurt overtake my expression, his unchanging. “You refused to speak with me. I had questions.”
“And what did you learn from all your research?” I can’t help the bitterness to my words. The cool bite of them.
The man has skin thick as iron. Nothing gets through to that hard, dark core of his. Nothing fazes him. He’s fire with a heart of dry ice. The burn of him is deadly.
“I learned that you are an introvert. You had very few friends, and yet your community valued you greatly. You volunteered in soup kitchens, the Church, and the pediatric hospital where your mother worked. But unlike her, your days spent there took a toll on you. Still, you went. If you weren’t volunteering, you mostly stayed home on weekends. Although, before and after Church service, you often flirted with the choir boy.”
“His name is Miles.”
His tone becomes pitch black and dangerous. “I am aware.”
Pulling my lip between my teeth, I fight the urge to flee him. When he looks at me like this, I can’t help but be reminded of how it felt in my early days with him. When he’d interrogated me, and terrified me.
Admittedly, he still terrifies me a little. But not as much as I know he should.
I don’t know why that is.
Then, something he said before registers, and horror strikes me hard. “Is he—is Miles still alive?”
Kirill watches me for a long moment. My breaths turn short. Finally, he puts me out of my misery. “He is.” I release a relieved breath. “For now.”
“What?” I wheeze. He can’t be serious.
“Why do you care about him either which way? You are married to me.”
Oh, my goodness, he is serious. “I can’t be the reason someone loses their life, Kirill. I can’t. I couldn’t—I couldn’t—” I’m struggling to breathe, to pull breath into my lungs. “I couldn’t live with myself.”
He studies me for a long moment, before he sighs. It’s a heavy sigh that reveals just how far off track we’ve travelled, and how displeased he is with himself for letting this go this far astray. The rope between us that was tethered so tight this morning, is once again frayed. I’m once again hanging on by a thread, dangling from a string of uncertainty over an angry ocean just waiting to swallow me whole. To consume my dreams and steal my air. To devour my life.
I stand, taking our dishes to the sink. I’ll deal with them later.
