Page 70 of Scars He Gave Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 2)

I hate him.

I love him.

I can never forgive him.

I can never live without him.

Tomas isn’t talking. He stands, arrow-straight and silent. “It’s all going to shit, Corrie. Alek, he…” He scrubs his hands over his face. “I need to know if you have any idea where I can find your boss.”

I shake my head but he’s already continued. “All the legitimate businesses got hit when he took down our security. And last night, Demetri and Yerkhov … Ilya found them out behind one of the clubs.”

I suck in a breath because before, the men he lost were all just abstract names. But now … Demetri and I just had a talk about the Patriot/Cowboys game—Demetri was a Dallas fan. And Yerkhov had three kids at home whose pictures he loved to show. “Oh, God, Tommy. I’m so sorry.”

When he lifts his head to look at me, the sadness draws me in until I’m standing an inch from him. “I’m losing everything, Corrie. I can’t lose you too. Not again.”

Silence. The longest silence of my life.

I want to comfort him, but I also want to know what’s coming next. I want to see his face.

“If I had known you were pregnant, I never would’ve left.”

Sadly, those words don’t help me. I’m angry instead. “That’s not even the point, Tommy. You left me before I had the chance to tell you.” My self-preservation instincts kick in to block the pain that thinking of our baby and everything we lost brings. I step back.

“I would sell my soul, give up everything I have or will ever have to be able to go back and change it. To not leave you. To not have wasted all this time.” His voice is low, deep, edged with pain.

How can I forgive him? How can I not? All I know is that he’s looking at me like his world is falling to pieces in his hands. It’s breaking my heart.

So when he steps to me and pulls me into his chest, I let him. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to resist his smell, his touch. Even after everything that’s happened. Even after everything that’s been done to me.

He was my first love. My last love. My savior. My downfall.

Tomas Dubrovsky is my everything. That will never change.

“Tommy …” I whisper. He surrounds me with his body. For a full minute, nothing matters but this. But his arms holding me.

“I’m so sorry, Corrie.”

When I feel myself starting to melt, wanting more than I’ll ever survive, I step back and blow out a breath.

“This is all too much,” I say, as much to myself as to him. “I need a drink.”

I step into the kitchen to open another bottle of wine. When I come back out with two full glasses, he’s standing at the side table. There’s something in his hands.

It’s the photo album. The one with the charred pictures I tried to destroy.

“Don’t look at that,” I tell him. I feel embarrassed suddenly. “It’s history.”

He flips the first page and something in his face softens. “It’s good history.” More than a hundred pictures are arranged in the book, each one a flash of a memory, a split second of perfection.

I can’t help myself; I lean over his shoulder.

Such happier days. Times when our biggest worry was when my parents would go to sleep so we could fall into each other’s arms again and again. The smiles on our faces were genuine. The love in our eyes was real. And Tommy kept his arm wrapped around my shoulders in every single picture, like he never wanted to let me go. Like he was claiming me from the world, keeping me safe from anything that would ever try to hurt me.

He traces a finger down the edge of the one I rescued from the fireplace. Flakes of ash break off. “We were happy, weren’t we?”

Tears are filling my eyes. He looks up at me. “Yes,” I tell him. “For a while.”

“Is it possible to get back to that?”

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