Billows was addicted to her. He might be a moody bastard, and it may have taken him time to realize she’d grown up, but he didn’t want to give her up. Now that Azelie was in college full-time and around more men, it had probably occurred to Billows he might lose her. That didn’t sit well, so he did what he always did—threatened and bullied to get his way.
Maestro realized threatening Azelie wasn’t the best way to get her attention. If Billows had taken the time to get to know her, he would see bullying her would never work. Billows was used to dismissing women, using them for his business to make a crapload of money. Any man involved in human trafficking had zero respect for women. Having Billows’ attention centered on Azelie was extremely dangerous for her. Having his man, McGrady, watching her every move was becoming annoying. Maestro intended to make certain Billows wanted to get rid of his spy.
“Andrii, you don’t have to continue if the memories are too painful,” she said softly.
He realized he’d taken too long with his introspection. He bunched her hair in his fist and tugged until she leaned closer to him. “I learned at a very young age not to believe anything a woman told me. My aunt had a business, and she was very sadistic. Her friends were sadistic. She pretended that she would take care of me and even went so far as to tell me how terrible my mother was, but she was far worse.”
Her eyes went liquid. For him. Those tears were real on his behalf. She shook her head. “That’s so wrong. A mother is supposed to protect and care for her children. Your aunt should have too. I don’t blame you for not believing in women.”
“Had it ended there, I may have survived intact.” He doubted it, but who knew what little kids blocked out? Being sold to pedophiles? He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t around children other than Czar’s and Steele’s. Every one of Czar’s children had been rescued from a trafficking ring or pedophile. They were traumatized but working their way through it. Steele’s son had been kidnapped and subjected to beatings at a very early age. He had escaped the worst of what could have happened because the club was able to rescue him. He didn’t point out that Azelie’s drunken mother hadn’t taken care of her either. She didn’t need that reminder; he knew she was very aware of it.
“My aunt supplied children to a man named Sorbacov. He was very high up in the government. He worked for the president and wielded a great deal of power. He was married and had children. Few knew of his proclivities, including the fact that like my aunt, he was a sadist. I was too young to recognize what a sadist was. I only knew they hurt me, and I couldn’t trust any of them.”
“Andrii,” she whispered his name, a small sob in her voice. She tightened her fingers on his thigh.
He needed that reassurance from her. Her touch kept him anchored in reality. He didn’t slip back into those childhood memories of pure torture. He stayed disconnected from the past and remained with her—with Azelie. His light in the interminable darkness he had lived in for so long.
“Sorbacov must have felt Anna was too greedy. Whatever the reason, he summoned my mother and Anna to a meeting and offered to purchase me from them. I could hear lies by that time. I was very young, but I already had that gift, mostly from self-preservation, not because I was so talented. I didn’t understand what he wanted from them or from me, but I knew that he wasn’t telling them the truth. I should have tried to warn them, but I knew if I opened my mouth I would have been beaten severely.”
“What terrible people. Seriously, Andrii, all three of them should have been executed on the spot.”
He liked that she didn’t say she thought they deserved to go to prison. She wanted them wiped off the face of the earth—just as he had wanted. He’d been five and already he knew suffering, betrayal, torture and death. He wanted all of them gone.
“My mother was quite willing to sell me again. Anna, not so much. I was worth more being sold daily than for just a onetime fee. My mother argued that I belonged to her, that I was hers to sell, and Anna should have nothing to do with the transaction. We were already at the school, although I had no idea what it was. Sorbacov had insisted the women meet him there.”
“The school where he raised you to be an assassin?”
He nodded. “Not just me. I wasn’t the only child there by a long shot. On the outside, the house appeared to be a huge mansion. The room where Sorbacov took us for the meeting was opulent, the furniture red-and-black velvet with gold braiding. I remember that very distinctly. Sorbacov had several men in the room with him. They were standing along the walls. He often had those men with him. They were quite brutal and thought nothing of raping women or children, both male and female. I didn’t understand why my mother and aunt didn’t realize they were in danger. The men were smirking. I could smell their arousal. By that time, even at that age, I knew all about sex.”
Her long lashes fluttered, catching tears. She shook her head. “Rape, maybe, but not sex,” she clarified.
He tried not to wince when she laid it out for him, showing him she understood what he was conveying to her. Using the term rape, while it was accurate, didn’t sit well with him. Not when it was coming out of his woman’s mouth. No man wanted his woman to associate him with pedophiles and rape in his past. He wanted to appear tough and capable, masculine and strong, to her.
Maestro forced himself to get beyond his protest. She was right to call it rape, but he didn’t like it. He thought it best to ignore the definition and just continue telling her about his past before he shut down.
“Sorbacov whispered to me not to worry, that no matter what the lying women said, he wouldn’t allow them to keep me. Even then I knew he was a liar. He was sadistic. He wanted me for the exact same reasons that my mother and aunt did. I had no worth as a person, only as a child to torture or have sex with. The women using me were every bit as bad as the men. Sometimes crueler—much, much crueler.”
A small frown appeared. “In what way?”
“They would pretend to be motherly or sweet. They would promise to help get me out of Sorbacov’s school. Several of them were that way. I wanted to believe them, so when I was a little kid, I did. They found it funny that I would be punished by Sorbacov for falling for a woman’s lie. It always earned me whippings and beatings. They took special delight in that.”
Azelie pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “It’s hard to imagine you escaped intact. What truly despicable people.”
“I wish I could tell you it ended there, but my nightmare was just beginning at that school. As I grew up, I was trained to be an assassin for the government. Mostly, that meant I was Sorbacov’s private assassin. If he didn’t like someone’s politics, he sent one of us. I wasn’t the only child there. Along with learning languages and how to kill, we were all subjected to a multitude of sexual practices and expected to be proficient in all of them. We had to be in total control of our bodies as well as those of our partners. The idea was to seduce our targets.”
Something elusive flashed across her face, into her eyes, and he just managed to restrain himself from cursing.
“I know how that sounds, Solnyshkuh. I know how you could interpret what I just said, especially since you’re concerned that I’m here for Billows and not you.”
She wasn’t going to reply. He could see the conflicting emotions. She wanted to believe him, but he was asking a lot of her. He knew that.
“Baby, I only have the truth to give you. The truth of who and what I am. The last thing I want to do is come clean and have you change that expression on your face when you’re looking at me.”
Her long lashes fluttered, and he got that look—the one he was beginning to crave. He needed her to view him in that light. To see under all the bullshit Sorbacov and his cronies had heaped on him, shaping him into a mistrustful, lethal misogynist. He needed her to find good in him, to believe in him. She was someone worthwhile. She’d suffered the ultimate betrayal, and she still had a light shining so bright in her she could light up the world.
He bent forward to cup her cheek again, his thumb sliding over the bow of her mouth, over those silky lips. “If there is such a thing as loving someone, if that emotion is real, I feel it for you. I want you to think the best of me, not know the worst. I was betrayed over and over. I know exactly what it feels like, and I have no intention of ever betraying you.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Andrii. Your life seems so harsh.”
He heard the compassion in her voice—also the trepidation. She was intelligent and she knew there was no getting over what he’d experienced. It would always color his life. Without warning, his need for reassurance, control and obedience might spring up at any moment.
“What happened to your mother and aunt? Did Sorbacov pay them off?”
He had half hoped she wouldn’t ask. He would never forget what Sorbacov had done to his mother and aunt. They were despicable women, but they didn’t deserve Sorbacov’s lesson in what women should be used for. Especially lying women, as he named them.
“Sorbacov loved to play with people and their emotions. It gave him great joy to watch others suffer. If there is such a thing as the ultimate sadist, it was Sorbacov. He wanted to see how long he could deceive someone. How many times they would let him go back on his word and then believe him again.”
Azelie frowned. “Adults continued to fall for his lies even after he’d proved himself a liar?”
She sounded so shocked that Maestro knew immediately she had that built-in radar now. She’d most likely always had a warning system but had developed it much faster and sharper after Quentin had murdered her family. That would be a challenge. He knew the old adage “once bitten, twice shy” applied. He’d had chunks torn out of him, and he would forever look for betrayal. He would have to carefully go over every word he said if he had to dodge her questions, make certain he never lied to her. He might get away with the sin of omission but not an outright lie.
Trust was everything between them. He was so concerned about betrayal he wanted to control their relationship—and her—in the hopes it could never happen. But he was in the position of committing a massive betrayal. She already suspected he had approached her to watch Billows.
She didn’t realize he was after a specific item, her key to the underground offices. If she was aware he planned to search her backpack for the necklace holding that key, he knew she would view that as a betrayal. He wasn’t certain how to get around that. He wanted to tell her the mission. He was sure she would go along with it, but he couldn’t pull her out and hide her in a safe house without tipping Billows off that something was radically wrong. If he told her, she would have to act like nothing was wrong. She already was having a difficult time.
“Andrii?” She said his name, a gentle inquiry.
“Sorbacov didn’t just deceive adults. His main targets were children. How many times they would rat on others. How many times, even after he refused to release them after his promises, they would believe him. That was the kind of shit he lived for. He did it every single day. No matter how many times I warned my female partners not to believe him, not to do as he said, they would tell him. Report me to him. I was trying to help them, stupid little girls who were desperate for Sorbacov’s favor. I didn’t deceive them, but it was him they trusted.”
For the first time, he didn’t sound distant from the past. He sounded bitter. He tasted bitter ashes in his mouth. Memories flooded his mind, sickening him. He broke out in a sweat. His skin felt clammy, yet he was hot—both symptoms that told him he was too close to the triggers that made him so dangerous at times.
“Honey.” Azelie’s fingers bit into his thigh muscle. “Just breathe. That’s what I do. That’s what you tell me to do. Just breathe through it. We can stop right here. I don’t need to know any more.”
Azelie was intelligent enough to know it was impossible to fake post-traumatic stress, not when the symptoms were physical. But he worried it was just another way he would appear weak to her. She needed a strong man. Showing this side of himself could blow his chances, when he thought telling her about his past would help her to understand why he was so strange.
He forced himself to look down into her upturned face. Heat blossomed, spread through him. She was looking back at him with that expression he craved in her eyes. He didn’t understand why or how that could be when he looked weak, but it was there. Adoration. Something close to love. Whatever connection they had wasn’t just physical. He was betting his life on that.
“You can’t look at me like that, Solnyshkuh, or we’re going to end up back in bed. Right at this moment, I want you more than my next breath.” That was the raw truth, and she had to hear it in his voice. She had to understand what she meant to him. “I don’t know how to say the right words to you. I can lie to you. I had the best teacher in how to deceive, but telling the truth to the one person who matters is more difficult than anything I’ve ever done.”
Maestro took her face between his hands. That face that was already more necessary to him than breathing. He was addicted to that look. He ran his thumb over her full, inviting lips. A faint smile curved her mouth beneath the light pressure of his thumb.
“I already let myself go a little crazy once. I’m not doing that again.”
He couldn’t help but smile. In the midst of a bad moment, she could shine her light on him and change his world.
“I think we’re going to do that a lot, Solnyshkuh.” He used his most compelling, velvet voice and watched the little shiver go through her with satisfaction. No matter how many alarms she tried to heed, she was very susceptible to him and their chemistry. He wanted everything between them to be real, so he was doing his best to give her what he could of himself, but he had a certain expertise, and as far as he was concerned, using it was fair. And they’d both reap the benefits.
“You think you have a poker face, Andrii, but I’m reading you right now. You’re going to use sex to get your way, just because you know I can’t resist you.”
