“What?” Dimitri echoed, his eyes lit with surprise.
I suppose I couldn’t blame him. It was a bizarre question for a woman in her forties to ask, but after seeing that look of utter reverence and devotion in his eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder what it felt like.
What it really felt like. Was it all mushy and gooey like they showed you in movies? Or was it deeper than that?
Love was not something in my world. Never had been. Not even with my family. My parents didn’t even like me. I was far too different for them, and they made that known to me every single day of my life. I said things I shouldn’t and did things that most normal kids wouldn’t do. They couldn’t handle that, and I’d grown up feeling like an outsider among my own blood.
Over the years, that rift just grew bigger and bigger. I never learnt how to build proper connections with others; those meaningful kinds of connections you needed to really become close with someone. And then, eventually, it got to a point where I didn’t even want it. I didn’t want friends. I didn’t want a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It all held zero appeal to me.
So, there I was, a forty-three-year-old woman who’d never experienced love before.
“You’ve never been in love?” There was no judgment in his voice. No pity. Only surprise, like it was a hard thing to comprehend, someone going their whole life without experiencing something that was fundamental to human nature.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Trust me, if you had, you would know.” His gaze drifted to my right and held. His eyes turned vacant, unreadable as he stared off into the empty air. I waited. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that. I made a mental note to confront him on it.
Another time.
“Love is…” There was almost a dreamlike note to the words as if he was reliving some sort of memory associated with the word. “Everything,” he breathed reverently. “It’s everything. It’s like coming home. An overwhelming sense of peace and serenity. It’s joy. Happiness. Awe. And a million other things that make your heart race so fast, you feel like it’s going to burst out of your chest. It’s warmth. And sunshine. And light and laughter. A hurricane of emotions that just knock you off your feet. It’s waking up early just so you can watch them sleep. It’s three A.M. trips to the store for ice cream because that’s what they feel like, and you’ll do anything to make them happy. It’s having all your worries and troubles just wash away with one smile on their lips.” Then his face turned sad. Full of pain. “Ultimately, though, love…is death. Because to love someone—and I mean truly, truly love someone—your heart…your soul…are tethered to theirs. So, when they die, you die too. Air might still enter your lungs. Your heart might still beat. Blood might still pump in your veins. But you’re not alive. Not really. Not anymore. That part of you that made you you died along with them. You might laugh or smile, but it will be empty. It will be meaningless. Everything will be empty without them. You’ll live your days like a zombie, coasting through life but never really living, waiting eagerly for the day when it will all end so you can be reunited with the other half of your soul.”
I was completely speechless. The way he spoke about love—about her—all that devotion… It was beautiful. And heart-wrenching. Was I glad that I’d never experienced that before? Something that was obviously so consuming, so crippling? Or was I jealous? Jealous that I might die before anyone would love me that fiercely?
“I don’t know whether I’m relieved to have never experienced love, or sad that I might die before I’m able to,” I said honestly, telling him exactly what was on my mind. Honest truth deserved honest truth in return. He’d shared more than he needed to with me, something incredibly personal. The least I could do was share something, too.
He remained silent for a moment, still staring off to my right before his eyes moved back to me, filled with so much emotion that I honestly thought I was seeing things. “Despite how painful love is, I wouldn’t give it up for anything. I’d suffer through it all over again if it meant one more day, one more hour, one more second in her presence. Every slash to my soul, every hit to my heart… I’d endure it a thousand times over because it’s worth it.”
Jesus. I never realised love was something I was missing out on until right then. What must it feel like to have someone so devoted and so dedicated to you and you alone?
I wanted that.
A silence stretched between us. Not awkward, but comfortable. I didn’t think either of us expected a conversation such as that to blossom between us, especially since we didn’t even like each other. But I suppose being locked up changed things. Being at death’s door changed things. We were both most likely going to die within the following few days. Sharing a few secrets didn’t seem so bad when you knew the person you were telling them to wasn’t going to live to spread them.
“I was hired to kill your brother.”
Dimitri’s eyes widened slightly, his body straightening and coming to life. Although it was dark, I could still see it—see him—clearly. His body was a fucking marvel. “So you are an assassin?”
“Picked up on that, did ya?”
“I called it the second you killed the man who was torturing you. Samuel.” His eyes ran the length of my body, down and up before settling on my face again. “What’s the name you work under?”
Most assassins had a name they liked to use when making their kills. A moniker. A way for them to claim the kill without giving up their identity. Mine was The Crimson Death.
But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
A girl’s gotta keep some of her secrets.
“It kills you that you don’t know it, doesn’t it?” I chuckled.
“Yes,” he surprisingly admitted. “I like to know who I’m working with.”
“It’s such a pity you’ll never know, then, huh?” I settled back into the cot, lying flat on my back, interlocking my fingers and putting them behind my head at the same time as I crossed my ankles. “You’re not surprised I was hired to kill your brother?”
“No. I’ve been trying to kill that fucker for years. I’m not surprised to hear someone else wants to as well. Who hired you?”
“Uh, uh, uh,” I tutted. “Client confidentiality is a big thing in my profession.” It wasn’t like I could tell him anyway. I didn’t even know. When I was contacted for a job, anonymity was something the client could choose if they so wished it. Instead of meeting up with me directly, this client chose to send one of his henchmen in his place. We met in an abandoned office building, where I was handed the file on Dominik, given my timeframe and half of the payment. The other half would be paid upon completion.
Which was never going to happen. Shit. If I ever did get out of there, I was going to have a serious problem on my hands that would need to be dealt with as soon as possible. Assassins were only as good as their reputations. If word got out that I failed to complete a job, my days as a hired killer would be well and truly over.
“What happened?” When I turned my head to look at him, a frown on my face at his question, he cocked his head. “All the assassins I know got into the business of killing people for a living because something happened in their life—something usually dark and twisted—that made them go down that path.” He held eye contact, never once looking away. “What happened to you?”
If he hadn’t just shared his own past, I might have told him to shove it up his ass and then rolled over and went to sleep. But, I was in a giving mood. So, why not?
Traumatic as the event was for me at the time, it was something I could now talk about freely. The scars from that day had healed, both mentally and physically, making it easier to open up.
“My parents and I went to Switzerland for a ’family holiday’,” I began, using air quotations because the entire thing was a fucking joke. “It was something suggested by my therapist to help bring us closer together. Help us bond, or whatever it is families are meant to do. Things had always been fucked up in our family. My brother, Corey, was the apple of my parents’ eye. Their firstborn. Their miracle child, as they so often told him, because he was the first pregnancy to make it to term after a string of miscarriages.”
“You keep saying ’was’.” It almost sounded like there sympathy in his voice.
There shouldn’t have been. My brother didn’t deserve any sympathy.
“He died in a car crash, and I’m fucking glad.”
His brow arched up high.
“He was a dick. Bullied me my whole life, and my parents let him because he was the golden child and I was the accident. They always took his side. Never mine. Not even when I told them about what he tried to do to me when I was eight years old.”
Dimitri frowned. “What did he try to do?”
I gave him a deadpan look.
“You’re joking,” he all but growled.
I shook my head. “Nope. Lucky for me, I had an affinity for sharp objects, even at that age. He’d been far too preoccupied feeling me up to notice when I grabbed the screwdriver and stabbed him in the eye with it. Unfortunately, he didn’t die. Just lost his eye. But he never tried that shit again, so it was a win-win, I guess.”
Anger burnt in his eyes. “There’s nothing more cowardly than hurting children.”
I debated not saying anything. I really, really did. We were having an actual conversation—one that didn’t involve us growling at each other or threatening to kill one another. But, of course, keeping my mouth shut when I had something to say wasn’t exactly my strong suit.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you—”
“No, I didn’t,” he snapped instantly, somehow knowing exactly what I was going to say. “I’ve never harmed a child.”
I frowned. Everyone knew the story behind the Bratva Butcher. After the death of his wife by a rival family in the Bratva, he took retribution by killing everyone in that family, and I mean everyone. Man, woman and child.
“But I thought—”
He cursed and abruptly got to his feet, moving towards the front of the cell. He leant against the bars, his arms crossed over his chest, face hard and stoic as he stared out into the darkness. “I know what you thought. What everyone thinks. And I let them believe it. Truth of the matter is, though, even in my state of anger, I could never kill a child. I’m a bastard, and evil to the core, but that’s one line I will never cross. During that dark time in my life, I killed a lot of people. Too many to count. Some of them had children. After I’d killed their parents, I couldn’t leave them there to fend for themselves. I had enough deaths on my conscience. I didn’t need more. So, I made sure they were taken care of.”
“And let everyone believe you’d murdered them?” I queried.
“Why not?” he asked, shrugging idly. “It made me a bigger monster in people’s eyes. Made them think twice about attacking me and my family. Only someone truly heinous could murder children. So, I let them think that I had. Instead, I took them to an orphanage. A baby, three toddlers and a couple of teenagers.”
So, the Butcher has a heart. Who knew?
“You’re not worried these kids are gonna come back when they’re all grown up and take their own form of retribution against you?”
“They’d be entitled to it,” was all he said. He turned to face me fully, arms crossed over that wide, expansive chest. “Switzerland?” he questioned, steering the conversation back to where it had originally begun.
“Switzerland,” I exhaled, sitting up and spinning around to plant my feet on the floor. “It was just my parents and I. It was supposed to be this huge bonding moment for us up in those mountains. Nothing but us and nature. Quality time.” I scoffed, shaking my head as the memories flooded back in a rush. Along with the anger. And the betrayal. “I knew they never really loved me. Corey was planned. I was the accident they didn’t want but were forced to have. But even I hadn’t been prepared for what they had planned.”
He frowned. Moved a step closer.
I kept going like I didn’t notice, but I did. I noticed everything he did.
“Imagine my surprise when they took me out to those mountains not to bond, not to finally build some sort of connection with me, but to hand me over to some man they’d met on the internet. To sell me to him.”
He took another step.
“I don’t even know how they knew someone in that game. My parents owned a shitty little furniture store in Australia. They weren’t drug users. Or dealers. Or killers. And yet, they’d managed to find some perv to sell me off to. Who knows, maybe there’s some sort of website out there where you can contact them. PervsRUs.com.”
Another step. “Australia?”
I whipped up a finger, pointing it at him. “If you ask me to say, ’throw another shrimp on the barbie, mate’, I’ll knock your two front teeth out,” I warned.
His hands flew up, palms out. He said nothing, but the smirk on his lips told me he’d been thinking about it.
I’d lived in America for over twenty years, but that Aussie twang never quite went away. I started talking with an American accent somewhere around the hundredth time someone asked me about crocodile fucking dundee.
“There were no tears. No apologies. No heartfelt goodbyes. To them, this was nothing more than a business arrangement. They just handed me over to that man and his two friends and walked away without looking back. What happened next… Well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.” I exhaled, continuing. “I fought as much as I could, but a fourteen-year-old girl was no match for three grown men. After they were done, I ran for it. Didn’t get very far. When they caught me out in those woods, they each took me again before beating the crap out of me and leaving me for dead.”
He moved again, coming closer and closer, bit by bit, until he was right there next to me. I didn’t look at him, but I could feel that intense gaze burning a hole in the side of my face.
“It was night. Cold. I was in so much pain that I could barely breathe, but I kept crawling. And crawling. And crawling. Everything hurt. Sticks and rocks cut into my skin with every movement, and still, I kept going. I don’t know why I fought so hard to survive. I had nothing. I had no one. And yet, I kept going, dragging myself across the dirt one agonising pull at a time. That was how Uncle E found me.”
“Uncle E?” Dimitri questioned softly, lowering himself into a crouch at my side.
“That’s what I call him,” I said, turning to look at him. “His name is Elias.”
Something flashed in Dimitri’s eyes. I ignored it and kept going.
“He found me out there, naked, bleeding and barely clinging to life. He took me in, nursed me back to health, gave me a roof over my head, clothes on my back. I asked him a couple years later why he did it, and you know what he said?”
“What did he say?” Was his voice softer? It sounded softer. Almost…kind.
“That I had a fighter’s soul.”
“You didn’t give up, even when it would have been so easy to do so. You’re a fighter, little one. You didn’t deserve to die in a ditch.”
“He taught me the skills I needed to ensure nothing like that ever happened to me again. For years, I trained. Every single day. Learning, perfecting those skills. And when I was ready, I got my revenge.” A smile curled my lips at the memory.
“You killed the men who raped you?”
“Not just them.”
He nodded in understanding. “Your parents.”
I searched his face for judgement and saw none. Given what his own flesh and blood had done to him, I should have known he’d understand.
There was something unbelievably freeing about talking to him in the dark. I could see him and not see him at the same time. Being surrounded by nothing but darkness just made me want to blurt out all my secrets.
Or was that just Dimitri?
He was surprisingly easy to talk to when he wasn’t being an uppity douchebag.
“There’s nothing quite like the sting of betrayal from someone who is supposed to be your family,” he whispered softly.
And that was when I knew. Knew that despite our obvious dislike for one another, there were certain parts of us that could relate to one another’s experiences. That we were a lot more alike than I had originally thought.
Shit. When did he get so close?
I took a deep breath in, trying to calm my erratically beating heart. My gaze was locked with his, nothing but the sounds of our breathing filling the air. Something passed between us. Something different. Unknown. Foreign.
His eyes flicked to my lips. Held. One second. Two seconds. What was he thinking? Was he wondering what my lips felt like? What I tasted like?
Why did I want him to be thinking those things?
Just as quickly as the moment between us appeared, it vanished, the shutters slamming down over his eyes, his face growing tense. Uncomfortable. He cleared his throat, rose to his full height and took three big steps back, almost running into the bars behind him.
“We should get some sleep,” he said gruffly, running his fingers through his hair. “We’ve got a busy day tomorrow, and I don’t want to hear you bitch about how tired you are.”
Andddd the asshole was back. Wonderful. Hadn’t even lasted an hour.
