Page 62 of Delivered to the Devil

“That’s my girl.” He wraps me in his arms as he kisses my hair, encompassing me in a blanket of safety—until his next words break it. “Now we’re going to sit in the water.”

The whole ordeal starts over. The crying, the begging, the clinging. But with endless reassurances and steady grips, he finally gets me there, and I beam with pride as I watch him sitting there in front of me with something like admiration glimmering in his eyes.

“You’re doing so well, Rebecca.” His smile widens, but only for a second. His features take on a grave expression as he says, “I want you all the way in now.”

I dart up, about to flee the tub, but Janos grabs me, pulling me back down.

“No, no, no, no. Not that. Janos, please, not that,” I beg, crying into his shoulder anew.

“Easy now, I’ll be right here with you,” he reassures, holding me in his lap in the water. “You need to feel that the water isn’t dangerous.” He holds me out to look at me. “It’s always something else that causes the danger: People, storms, waves, strong currents. Cold. Never the water itself.”

I stare down at the water. It neither looks nor feels dangerous. “Are you dangerous?” My gaze darts up to the gray eyes in front of me. I find the answer there before Janos confirms with a single word.

“Yes.” There’s no hesitance. No apology. He’s the most dangerous man I’ve ever encountered. But his words are full of sincerity as he adds, “But right now, I’m keeping you safe.”

Janos ends up getting me all the way in, lying under the water several times. At one point, I even manage to dive down onmy own without clutching his hands. Only for a second, though. I’m beaming with pride when I come back up and see the same pride reflected in the crinkles around his eyes.

“No more today,” he says, taking my hands as he stares into my eyes with an intimacy that has my heart beating faster—this time because of something beyond panic. “We’ll just sit here for a while.”

The air becomes fraught with something unspoken—an emotion neither of us dares put words to. He keeps watching me like he wants to say something, and when I can’t take the tension anymore, I break the silence.

“Do you always do this for Gabor’s girls?”

“Do what?”

“This.” I stare off into the room, too vulnerable to face him. “Help them overcome their fear of water.”

“No.”

I turn back to him and blurt another question, unable to stop myself. “Do you always feed them?”

“No.”

“Do you always watch over them while they sleep?”

Janos’s expression darkens with latent emotion as he gives me another monosyllabic answer. “No.”

I know I should probably stop, but I can’t. I need answers. “Do you draw circles on their backs when Gabor uses them?” My voice cracks as I add the next words, “To comfort them.”

Janos’s jaw tenses like it’s as hard for him to admit that I’m more than a job as it’s hard for me to believe it. He’s quiet for a while, and I think this is more than he’ll be able to admit to, but finally he does. “No.”

My heart skips a beat, and reckless as I am, I let his answer drive me into more questions. Questions that require more than a single syllable for an answer.

With my pulse pounding in my neck, I let out the question I’ve searched for an explanation for since the first night Janos broke into my apartment and gave me to Gabor. “Why did you suddenly become protective over me on the first night?”

He was as cold and detached as the other henchman when he pulled me out from under the bed and stripped my clothes off. But suddenly, everything shifted and his touch became slow and careful. Protective. At the time, I didn’t dare believe that it was more than a change of mood—coincidence. I didn’t dare believe that this dangerous man might hold more than pure brutality. But slowly, I realized there’s so much more to Janos behind the hard surface.

He presses his hand to my chest in a shockingly intimate gesture and lets his eyes fall to it as he trails it down between my breasts, over my sternum, and into the water to continue down to my thigh. There, he lets it rest as he moves his gaze back up to find mine. “There was something in your eyes. Something vulnerable and innocent that called upon something in me. The other girls are always pure hatred and fear. But not you.” He lifts his hand out of the water to splay it over my cheek in a tender gesture that has me gulping down a growing knot of emotion. “You begged me to protect you even though I was hurting you.” He moves his thumb over my skin as his eyes soften into a shockingly loving expression. “So I did.”

Neither of us say more for a long time. I don’t know how to respond to his startling honesty, so I just sit there and let him wash me, then lift me out of the water, dry me off, and take me to bed.

He lies down behind me, caressing my stomach as the darkness envelops us, coaxing us to sleep. But neither of us is ready to let go of this intimacy, and too many questions are still swirling in my mind.

I decide to take this opportunity to get some answers, hoping to God it won’t push him away.

“How long have you worked for Gabor?” I ask.

As always, it takes a little while before he answers. “Since I was fourteen,” he says, continuing the soothing circles on my stomach. “I had just rerouted one of his shipments and taken the whole stash for myself. Gabor was furious. No one had ever duped him over the way I had, and he was pissed. He came to kill me and take back what belonged to him, but his shipment was already long gone. I would have been the same if it hadn’t been for the knife in my gut.”

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