Page 1 of Skin Deep

26 Years Ago…

“Youbastard!”

The sting of my wife’s slap didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the hurt in her voice.

“How could you?” she demanded and raised her hand again.

I caught her wrist and held it. I had buried men for less, cut off their hands and feet and dropped them in the river to rot for disrespectful mumblings. The parking lots of Columbus were paved over the graveyards I had populated over the last twenty years.

One slap was all I could allow.

Tears shimmered in her bright blue eyes. She jerked her hand away and shoved me back. “He’s our son! Our only son, Nikita!”

As she collapsed in the chair, wracked with sobs, I sighed and drew my fingers through my hair, trying to decide what to say. I’d never been any good at calming crying women. That was one of the reasons I preferred to have relationships with men. When I fought with Yuri, we didn’t shout. There were no tears, no icy glares for days afterward. He just punched me in the gut and told me I was being a dickhead. Then we’d fuck and get over it, and everything would be fine.

My wife, Tatiana, was not so easily placated.

“I didn’t have a choice, Tatty. Not if you want him to survive us,” I said.

She lowered her delicate hands from her tear-stained face, her diamond earrings glittering in the low light. I’d given them to her for our fourth anniversary. That seemed a lifetime ago now. We were different people then.

“He’s a child,” she said coldly. “You had him pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and carried out of our home, gagged and bound, in a bag!”

“And I am telling you it was the only way to get him out of here unseen,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “Simeon is watching everything we do. If he suspected, even for a moment, I meant to move the boy out of his reach…”

There would be blood. Even this way, I would pay the price for undermining Simeon the Immortal’s plans. Perhaps my father would even have me killed over it. Better me than my son.

“He must’ve been terrified,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “You should have told him. You should have told me!”

“I couldn’t risk it,” I said firmly. “If my father suspected anything, he would have grabbed Warrick himself, Tatty. That would have happened eventually, and you know it.”

When I discovered my father had plans to kidnap my son, I knew I had to act. I knew where it would lead because I had been through my father’s brutal training. Simeon the Immortal believed that a boy became a man through pain and suffering. My childhood had been filled with near daily beatings, and when I was a teenager, things only got worse. If I showed even a hint of empathy or emotion, I was taken somewhere and given exercises to work it out.

Only Simeon’s idea of an exercise usually involved beatings, guns, and sometimes dismemberment of anyone he thought I was getting too close to.

It would be worse for Warrick, too. He was a quiet, sensitive boy who liked dancing to his mother’s music and reading his books. My son was smarter than a whip with a vengeful streak a mile wide, but the boy was also an anxious wreck. He was overly concerned about his health for a boy of ten, and he was a picky eater. Any change in his daily routine was met with tears and sometimes violent outbursts, though that violence had always been directed at himself.

Warrick was a good boy, but he was a square forced to squeeze into a triangular box. The world didn’t fit him. Simeon’s world of violence for profit would fit him even less.

Simeon didn’t care. He would shave off whatever rough edges Warrick had and hack bits of him off until there was nothing left of the boy who loved dragons and dancing. Simeon would kill the boy and raise in his place a monster. Someone like me. I couldn’t allow that.

“A boy needs his mother and his father,” she said, adamant.

I picked up the tumbler of whiskey I’d poured earlier and swallowed it, letting the burn ground me. “And he will have both when he goes to live with Annie and Yuri.”

“Warrick is not Annie and Yuri’s son.”

I leveled a firm glare at her. “No. He’s our son. Ours to protect, even from ourselves if need be.”

Tatty remained defiant as always. I didn’t know why I expected anything less from her. “You can’t keep me from him.”

“I didn’t intend to,” I said, turning away. “I only intended to keep him away from Simeon, and from me.”

There was a beat of silence before she asked, “You don’t think he will want his father?”

I sighed and refilled my glass. “I don’t think it matters what he wants.” When I turned, I met her eyes, letting my mask fall so she could see the heartless predator beneath, the demon my father had turned me into. “You know me, Tatty. I’m a selfish, scheming bastard like my father. I will use the boy against Simeon if he doesn’t stay away. It’s in my nature. A man can’t fight his nature.”

She rose and crossed the room to put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re still his father.”

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