Page 74 of Craving Dahlia

Alek’s jaw tightens. “No. Now I wish to God we had. But I was stubborn—and, like I said, thought I was in love. I told Elia I didn’t care if either of our fathers approved of the marriage, and she said hers did. She made me believe she was madly in love with me. She wanted marriage, a family, all of it. She convinced me that she should go off of birth control, that if she was pregnant, my father couldn’t argue with us marrying. I hadn’t met her father when he came to visit—mine refused to allow me in the meeting and Elia and I ended up leaving town for a few days after he and I argued about it—and she wanted me to go to Moscow with her to meet him and the rest of her family. I wasn’t sure—mostly because I knew how much strife it would cause with my father—but she convinced me. She told me thatshe thought she might be pregnant already, that she’d find out for sure while we were there, and she wanted to be able to tell her family in person if it was true.”

Alek’s voice cracks slightly if he speaks, and my chest tightens, my eyes burning. I can hear the pain in his voice with every word, and I want to reach out and wrap my arms around him, pull him down to me and hold him there. However this story ends, it won’t be happy, and I’m beginning to understand why this pregnancy has been such a sensitive topic for him.

“We went to Moscow, and the first night, we had dinner at her father’s home. Something felt—off. A gut instinct, I suppose, from years of being my father’s enforcer, but I ignored it. I told myself I was being paranoid. That there was no reason for anything to be wrong.” Alek grits his teeth, and his hand tightens around mind. “They drugged me that night, at dinner. I woke up in a cell, in the lower part of the Volnov compound. I was terrified for Elia, more than myself—until she came to see me.”

He goes silent for a long moment, and my stomach twists with dread. “Alek?—”

He shakes his head. “Just let me finish,” he manages, his voice tight. “I found out that night that all of it was a lie. The entire relationship, beginning to end. My father had angered the wrong people in Moscow, men high up in the Bratva hierarchy there. The visit from the Volnovpakhanhad nothing to do with marriage, but to try to convince my father to give them what they wanted—part of his territory, and money to pay off the insult he’d given them. When he refused, they continued with their plan that they’d laid from the start.”

“Was it her?” I whisper, pieces beginning to fall into place, and Alek nods sharply.

“She was sent to seduce me from the start—to get me to fall in love with her. If my father refused to bend, as they expected he would, she was instructed to get me to Moscow. There, I’dbe imprisoned and…convincedto turn on my family. To return, murder my father and brother, and take over the Yashkov Bratva under the control of the Volnov family, as a proxy.”

“You can’t be serious.” Even as I say it, I know he is. There’s no way this is anything but the absolute truth, from the look on his face—and I think of the scars I felt that first night, the map of suffering written across his body that he’s never let me see. “Oh god, Alek?—”

“They tortured me for information about the family, and then they tortured me to try to convince me to go along with their plan. When I refused, they would bring me to the brink of death, allow me to heal, and then they would start over again.” He swallows audibly, every muscle in his body gone tight with the memories. “After a certain point, they no longer believed they could turn me. So instead, Gregoriy Volnov simply took pleasure in finding out how long he could keep me alive in that cycle. It lasted five years before I managed to escape—eight months ago.”

“What happened to Elia?” I whisper, and Alek shrugs.

“So far as I know? She’s living her life. She only came to visit me that one time, to tell me the truth, and I never saw her again. She did her job,” he adds bitterly. “After that, she had no reason to come and see me.”

“Alek, I’m so sorry.” I push myself up so that I’m sitting up fully, and I reach out, touching his cheek with my fingertips. He flinches, but he doesn’t pull away, and I lay my palm against his cheek, turning his face towards mine. “I had no idea. I mean—I knew something had happened, but I couldn’t have imagined?—”

“Of course not.” His voice is rough around the edges, choked with emotion. I can feel it in the air between us, tense and thick, everything that he’s been hiding for so long starting to come out. “How could you? I didn’t tell you anything. I should have,zhena. I should have told you all of it, should have protected you better?—”

“It makes sense now,” I whisper. “Why you didn’t trust me, why you thought I was lying—Alek, I understand you not telling me. You couldn’t even let yourself believe anything I was saying. And why would you, after—” Everything that’s happened between us shifts in my head, cast in a different light now. One colored by an awful betrayal and unimaginable pain, suffering that I can’t begin to imagine enduring. I spent just a few days in that warehouse, and I can’t imagine torture worse than that, for years and years—how anyone could bear it. “I understand, Alek. Or, I mean—I can’tunderstand, but I know why?—”

He leans forward, his mouth capturing mine. I freeze for a moment, startled by the sudden kiss, and his hand slides behind my head, cupping it gently as his tongue slides over my lower lip, pushing into my mouth as it opens on a gasp. For a brief moment, he kisses me with complete abandon, a groan vibrating against my mouth as his fingers thread through my hair.

And then, just as quickly, he pulls back.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I—you’re still healing. I shouldn’t have touched you. I—I don’t know how to do this, Dahlia. I’ve forgotten—” He swallows hard. “In a lot of ways, I think I’ve forgotten how to be a man. How to feel like anything other than an animal. It—those five years reduced me to that, in that cage. And once I was free, I didn’t feel real any longer. Nothing did, until?—”

“Until what?” I whisper, and his gaze flits to my mouth and up again, that hungry look that I recognize in his eyes. I understand it now, why he seemed so starved that first night, why he wanted me so badly. Five years of loneliness, of pain, of not being touched in any way that didn’t hurt. Although?—

“Until you,” he murmurs. “I was afraid to fuck anyone after I escaped. I was afraid I’d fall again, be tricked, be betrayed—I was waiting for it. I thought she’d ruined me. And then I saw you, and I had to have you. I couldn’t—I told myself it would bethe one night. That’s why I was so angry when I saw you again. I was terrified of falling for someone who would hurt me like that again. So I pushed you away. I tried to hurt you so you’d hate me. And I’m so fucking sorry for it?—

“That night—” I swallow hard, and I find the courage to ask the question lingering in my head. “Was I?—”

“You were the first woman I’d touched since I escaped,” he murmurs, his eyes darkening at the memory. “The first woman I took to bed sinceher. I lost control with you. Everything about you—you made me feel alive again. You made me feel like a man for the first time in five years, and I—” His jaw tightens. “I’ve been dying to feel that way again with you every day since.”

My heart beats harder in my chest, desire heating my skin, my blood, all the way down to my core. “Go lock the door,” I whisper. “Come back to bed with me.”

Alek hesitates. “I know nothing has changed since you left?—”

“Everything changed. Everything has changed when you told me the truth. And you didn’t mean what you said that day. I wish you hadn’t said it—I wish you’d never lied to me, that you’d been honest from the start—but I see now why you did. And you wouldn’t have saved me if you meant it. You wouldn’t have come back for me.” I draw in a slow breath, trying to think past the whirl of emotions and desire that everything he’s said in the last few minutes has roused in me. “There’s just one thing I want.”

“What,zhena?” Alek’s gaze holds mine, and I can see how much he wants me. How hard it is for him to hold back.

“I wantyou. I want to see you.” I swallow hard. “No clothes. No blindfolds. Nothing between us. Give me that, and thatwillchange everything. We can—we can try to do this, for real, if you want. But you have to trust me enough to let me see.”

There’s fear in his eyes at that, and it startles me, cutting me to the bone. I can’t imagine anything frightening this man—butthatdoes, the thought of me seeing him. “It’s—difficult to look at,” Alek says slowly. “You might not?—”

“I’ll want you regardless,” I promise. “Trust me.”

He freezes at those two words.

“You can trust me,” I whisper softly. “I’d never hurt you, Alek. I’d never turn on you, or betray you, or lie to you. Even when I was hurt and terrified, I wouldn’t give them anything.”

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