Anger flares in Elijah’s eyes as he stalks toward me, the monster the world sees dancing at the edge and threatening to consume me.
But he’s not the only one with fury beating through his veins. I’ve never been angrier than I am right now, because not only has Elijah taken everything for me, but he also now thinks he has the monopoly over my body as well. I don’t fucking think so.
His body is imposing as he towers over me. His hard lines and menacing tattoos cause my body to tremble despite itself. I don’t want him to see my weakness, but he sees everything.
Elijah has been watching me for a decade, and I suspect there isn’t a thing I could get past him.
When his hand lifts toward my face, I can’t help but flinch, my heart lurching into my throat at the motion. His arm freezes in midair, horror crossing the moss green of his eyes.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Elijah look so… hurt. That’s the only word I can come up with to describe the way he’s staring at me.
We stare at each other for long moments, neither of us moving a muscle, and then he’s surrounding me.
His body is imposing as it envelops mine in his warmth. The moment his arms wrap around me, everything I’ve been trying to hide from him, all the emotions I’ve been stamping down, it all breaks from my chest at once and a painful sob tears from my throat.
Elijah lifts one of his hands to the back of my head and holds it to his chest. The water beats down on our skin, the combination of his warmth and the steam makes it hard to pull in a breath, but I’m not willing to drag myself away from the comfort he’s providing me.
As if he can tell I’m overheating, he reaches for the faucet without a word and shuts off the spray.
He keeps one arm wrapped around me, and reaches for a towel, folding it around my shoulder and gently patting the droplets from my skin.
His silence is unsettling. I’ve spent my entire life around men like Elijah, and I know the quiet never means anything good. The tension in his chest and shoulders vibrates through his body, but his touch is nothing but gentle, despite it being at complete odds with his nature.
He dries me without a word, using one hand to quickly pat some of the water from his naked body before lifting my towel-covered body from the cool tiles and carrying me straight through the room.
He doesn’t release me for a moment, not when he crawls onto the bed, droplets of water seeping into the sheets as he positions us with me cradled in his lap, and not even when he pulls the sheets up around us, making sure my whole body is covered.
Silence envelops us, and I lean into it. The only sounds are our combined breathing. We’re quiet for so long that my heartbeat starts to come down, the tears rolling down my cheeks begin to slow, and the heaving in my chest begins to calm.
Elijah’s hand moves to the back of my neck, holding me securely against him so there’s nowhere I can go, and honestly, I don’t want to go anywhere. I need him right now, no matter how fucked up that is, how much I should want to run a mile from the man who has taken everything from me, I don’t want to.
“I will never hurt you, Snow.” Elijah’s deep rumble startles me slightly, but I allow myself to relax back into his warmth. “I’m not my uncles, and I don’t think you’re dispensable. You are everything.” He pauses for a moment, as if finding the right words for whatever is coming next. “When we met, my father immediately noticed how I looked at you. I was still young, and I hadn’t quite figured out that my family were bad people. I was kept isolated from other children growing up, aside from Everett of course, and I guess even him to a certain extent. It never occurred to me that I should hide my affection for you from them.”
I shift slightly, trying to look up at him. It’s clear that whatever he’s about to tell me is meaningful, and I want to be able to look into his eyes as he tells me the story. But when he steels his arms around me, holding me in place, I don’t fight him. It’s not in his nature to be vulnerable, and if he’s going to lay all his cards out on the table for me, I need to respect his boundaries, even if he hasn’t shown me the same courtesy so far.
“They saw it as a way to attack your family. I’m sure you’re well aware of our complicated shared history and throwing in that Everett chose your family over his own… it made things tense. They thought that if I got close to you, perhaps they would have the in they always needed to bring everything down from the inside.”
Why is he telling me this? The thought strikes me that perhaps this entire thing has been a ruse to avenge his family. That maybe the alliance, taking me, marrying me, it all feeds back into some revenge plot that I’ve found myself the center of.
Elijah brushes his fingers down my spine, silently telling me to relax, and I can’t help but comply. “I had to get sneaky about how I watched you and had to throw them off the scent. One day my uncle Angelo came over with this woman.” He shakes his head, the movement jostling my body slightly, but I make no move, remaining perfectly still so as not to interrupt. “I was about seventeen at the time, I think, and I’d never really found members of the opposite sex that appealing. Apart from you of course.” He tightens his grasp around me, and I almost believe it’s to remind him I’m here and that I’m real, even if the circumstances that brought me here weren’t above board. “I was forced to lose my virginity at the same age Everett was, to become a man, they said, but after that, it just wasn’t something that interested me that much, especially because the women my father and uncles would have around, were there against their will. I wasn’t into it.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to remind him that I’m here against my will and that he doesn’t seem to have a problem with getting off on keeping an unwilling woman locked up in his house, but I manage to swallow down the comment.
“But this woman Uncle Angelo brought around to the house one afternoon was a test. I knew it the moment she walked in the door because of the way he watched me. They wanted me to prove what I said about you was true, that I had no interest in the littlest Saint James. They wanted to catch me out on a lie because if it was you who I was truly interested in, they would use it, and me, to bring your family down from the inside.”
Elijah is quiet for long moments, but his body vibrates with the unspoken words, and even without him saying another word, it’s clear this story is going somewhere dark, and after all I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours, I’m not sure I can handle it. But I don’t move. I remain perfectly still, leaning into the warmth he emits and finding comfort in the soft circles he draws into my bare back.
“Her name was Serena,” he tells me. “She was taken from her family in France, stolen away in the night, without so much as a goodbye. From what I could tell, her father owed Uncle Angelo some money, and when he didn’t pay, he took something else in return for his generosity. Although the Russo family name doesn’t extend as far as yours, there’s a reason we are known for the atrocities that we are.”
My body stills at his words. I’ve always known the Russo family were involved in some bad shit, way worse than any of the pies my family have our fingers in. But to take someone’s daughter, to steal them away without so much as a thought, it gives me room for pause.
Serena and I are not alike. Our situations may as well be worlds apart. Elijah has taken me from my life, that much is true, but it’s not because of some revenge plot, or because my family owes him money. It’s because he wants me, and if I’m really honest with myself, if I allow myself to put all the reasons this situation is fucked up to the side, I want him too.
When we come together, it’s like thunder and lightning. Two forces that move in a symphony despite themselves.
The revelation has my heart stalling in my chest, but I force myself to remain relaxed as Elijah continues. “She was a nice enough girl, intelligent. She would have had a great future if she’d been given the opportunity. But being taken by Angelo Russo may as well have been a death sentence. Hell, death would have been far kinder than the fate Serena met.”
I squeeze my eyes closed, tears pooling behind the lids that I can’t allow to fall against my cheeks. If he realizes how much the story is upsetting me, he might stop, and my morbid curiosity is getting the better of me. Whatever he’s about to tell me, whatever his uncle did to this poor girl, was caused by me. Regardless of whether I knew it or not, I played a part in someone else’s pain.
“What happened to her?”
