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He glares at me. “Stop talking, wife. Stop hurting yourself on my account.”
When he stands, I grab his hand, clutch at him. “Don’t go.” He looks pained, and that pains me. I pull myself to sit, but when I wince, he lowers back to the bed again. “Please, Kirill, I need you to stay.”
His throat works as he swallows, but after a moment, he nods.
Flipping back the covers, I invite my husband inside as I know I will every day of my life, for the rest of my life. We may have started out so very wrong, but somehow along the way, we took a very right turn. And then we just kept on going.
“I don’t blame you,” I say softly, so as not to hurt my abused throat. “I don’t blame you for any of it.”
“You killed a man today, Ruby, because I failed to keep you safe. You were hurt today—you almost died?—”
“But I didn’t.” I twist in his arms, pressing my lips to the hollow of his throat. The scent of cedar and flame is tinged by the acrid scent of his fear. Fear for me. For us. “I didn’t, Kirill. I’m here, and I’m okay.” I kiss him again, moving my arms around his body to cling to him tightly. “And he will never hurt either of us again.”
He sets his lips to the crown of my head. He’s not kissing me, just resting there agaisnt me. Holding me. Being held by me. I whisper, “I love you.”
The sound he releases hurts me so much, because there’s so much hurt in it. This big bear of a man—my man—struggled with the events of today. He struggled, and is struggling. I think, long after I’m okay again—long after I’ve forgiven myself for taking a life—long after I’ve healed—that he will still be tormented by the feelings he felt today. The fear that plagued him. He will be haunted for weeks, months, maybe years to come.
But as long as he doesn’t shut me out, I can help him heal.
His arms pulse around me as I press another kiss to his chest where the buttons of his shirt have been pulled loose. And then, because I’ve never felt safer than I do when I’m in his arms, more at home and cherished, I fall asleep.
Forty-Seven
Kirill
The woman is so deep under my skin, she’s the blood in my veins. I’ve been plagued by nightmares before, since I was a boy, in fact. Sleep never came easy to me—until I slept wrapped around her. Calm never came without the threat of tight control, until the scent of roses swept away all tension.
But these last weeks, watching the bruises around her neck turn brutally dark, then hideously green, then yellow, to finally fade away altogether, has been torture. My nightmare stares back at me with honey-gold eyes and heart-shaped lips that whisper gentle words into brittle silence. She’s a dream come true, and yet I can’t seem to scrub away the way I’d felt when I’d feared I’d lost her. It haunts me. Day and night. A nightmare beating in the heart of a dream.
She begs for my touch in a way I’m hopeless to deny. I’ve made love to my wife, every night since she regained her voice and sometimes in the middle of the day, whenever she initiates it. It’s not that I don’t ache for her. I do.
I crave her with the lunacy of a madman. The depths that I burn for her are hellish when unsated, and the tender loving does very little to sate the ravenous bear within. He claws at the core of me, shredding me from the inside out in his desperation to possess her.
But I am stayed by the thought of hurting her. Of taking from her the thing my monster craves. The raw, sometimes brutal, claiming.
Before she’d been taken, I hadn’t blinked twice at fucking her. At losing myself inside her sweetness. Now—now I am a haunted man.
I’m haunted at the thought of losing her in any capacity. Of pushing her too far. Of hurting her.
I am a man paralyzed.
I’d talked to Ilya about it, knowing that Irelynn had also been taken from him. But he didn’t struggle as I do. Instead of fearing that he might hurt her more than she’d already been hurt, he’d fought with a desperate and unyielding need to claim her. To possess her. To brand her, and fill her, and own her.
I have these needs as well, which is where the lunacy comes in. The madness that tugs me, tearing at me from every angle until I am a shred of skin and animal urges.
I’m losing my fucking mind.
I’m exhausted and riled up at the same time. I’m bone weary and ravenous.
I want my wife. I want to consume her, and I want to lose myself inside her even as I am repressed by the unbending need to protect her. To make amends for my failure to protect her.
I throw vodka on my thoughts as the office door opens and Dimitri enters. He steps into the dark room, lit only by the dim bulb of a single lamp that sits on my desk. The day had been a shit-show. Delays in building materials had suspended the project again. It’s a matter anything gets built in this country with the hoops one has to jump. I won’t even get started on the construction lags. I have half a mind to hire someone to oversee this project, but I like to be hands-on. I like to be involved in the things I begin.
But I want to be with her. My ache to be where she is leaves me restless and more difficult to work with than usual, I am aware.
Fuck, I should be upstairs with her. It’s late.
I wonder if she’s asleep…
