She wouldn’t, because she’d become something more.
She’d become a survivor.
“She may be volatile when she wakes up. Between the foiled suicide attempt and everything she was already dealing with, you may find that you don’t recognize Irina. She’s prone to violent rages,” Dr. Lawrence explained, glancing toward where Irina slept in my bed. I’d moved her as soon as she’d fallen asleep, bringing her to the space that would now be her new home.
“I can’t see Irina intentionally hurting someone,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest as I watched her sleeping form. She could wake up at any moment, the physician having decided that she’d slept enough to stop administering the sedatives.
It was time for my butterfly to rise again.
“She doesn’t,” Dr. Lawrence said, nodding her head. “She hurts herself, mostly.” She avoided touching me so pointedly that I knew Irina had spoken to her therapist about my aversion to it.
It was still present, still part of me, but somehow Irina was more important. I couldn’t promise we wouldn’t have our issues, couldn’t even begin to guess if she would ever reach a point where she could allow me to touch her.
Not with what she’d gone through. Not with the ways she’d been violated. I would go my entire life without touch if that was what she needed, as long as she sat beside me and smiled.
Her eyelids fluttered, the first signs of life in the sleeping beauty who had come so close to never waking again.
Fuck, the thought of a world without her in it, without her smile to light up the faces of the children she worked with—it was unimaginable.
Unforgivable.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Dr. Lawrence said, picking up on the subtle shift of Irina’s head as she moved. She disappeared out the door to my bedroom, leaving Irina and me alone except for the guard stationed outside at all times. We didn’t have the men to spare, but I wouldn’t take any more chances with her life.
I moved toward the right side of my bed, climbing in and lying beside her. I touched the bare skin of her bicep, her body too frail and thin under my hand. All the vitality of her lithe form had twisted into something else as she wilted away in front of me, but I’d been too wrapped up in my own shit to realize how desperately she needed help.
Sometimes people healed on their own. Sometimes they fought through the muck and mire to find the light on the other side. But others, they reached out a hand for help and let someone pull them out of the worst of the mud.
I’d always pull her free.
Her eye opened slowly, the faint light coming from the parted curtains touching her face. She moved away from it with a little moan, her face turning in my direction to give me the full power of that remarkable beauty.
With her face thinner than was healthy, she looked so much like her mother. So much like the woman who I was convinced had made it so that there would never be a future for Irina and me.
How could she be with the man who had murdered her mother in cold blood? How could she ever look me in the eye and know that my cruel stare was the last thing her mother had seen as she bled out on the dirt of the Bellandi rose garden?
Irina could overcome almost anything. But her love couldn’t overcome that.
She could never know the truth. She could never discover that her mother had shacked up with Franco Bellandi after abandoning her, and that she’d gotten involved with the drug distribution and made a critical error with her negligence.
One that had killed my sister.
Franco hadn’t cared when he saw his favorite toy on my list of names. Her brother in Philadelphia hadn’t cared, either. They’d watched her die, the people she’d tied her life to doing nothing to save her, and yet she’d abandoned the child who would have given anything to have her mother with her.
She’d deserved everything she got, and I wouldn’t apologize for ridding Irina of a person who didn’t appreciate her. I’d do it all over again, every day until I died, if it meant she had peace from the toxicity of that kind of fleeting love.
“Morning, Butterfly,” I murmured, watching the way my fingers trailed over her skin. Seeing my scarred hands against her had been a trigger in the past, a reminder of how wrong I was for her. It hadn’t even been the external scars that I bore that had convinced me I didn’t deserve her, but the ones that stained my soul.
Those scars marked me as broken, but Irina’s soul matched mine. Even before her rape, even before he’d mutilated her body with his name, something inside her had called to me, a perfect echo of the monster inside me. She was everything submissive to my beast, everything that complemented my need to dominate and own her.
It should have appalled me, but knowing that I would take better care of her and make sure she finally took care of herself...I couldn’t find it in me to regret the decision.
I’d hesitated to make her mine, but I’d meant what I said; Irina would live for me. I would become her everything.
The same way she’d become mine.
Her eyes opened fully, landing on mine where I stared down at her. She glanced down to the hand touching her, swallowing past her nerves as she tried to make sense of all that had happened. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired,” she said, shifting her body away from me. I hated the distance, hated the fact that she’d gone to the effort to put space between us, but I allowed it for the moment. There were more urgent needs to tend to than my desire to keep her close.
Soon enough, Irina would understand what I meant when I said she’d live for me. Her life had become mine the moment she’d been so willing to throw it away.
I’d dictate every facet of her existence. I’d tell her what to wear, where to go, what to do. Freedom was nothing more than an illusion for her now.
Another thread in the net I’d use to keep her mine.
“You can sleep more later,” I said, shifting to sit next to her. After glancing down at the tired glare on her face, I finally stood from the bed and stepped around the foot, going to the side where Irina lay. Her hair was a mess from sleeping, the raven locks spilled over my pillow calling to something possessive inside me.
I liked her inside my space. In the sanctuary I’d created for myself when I was a boy.
I tossed the blanket back, sliding a hand beneath her back and one behind her knees and lifting her into my arms. She groaned, the pain of her sore muscles protesting the change.
In the weeks since we’d rescued her, the swelling on her face had disappeared. The bruising on her face was now gone, only the faintest trace of yellow remaining when I really searched for it. The stitches on her stomach had come out, leaving behind the scars that she’d wear for the rest of her life.
I carried her to the bathroom, tilting my head to the side as she snuggled into my neck. The sleepy action probably wasn’t even conscious, something she did out of reflex rather than any desire to be close to me. If what Dr. Lawrence said was true, Irina’s hatred toward me for what I’d stopped would come soon enough.
Setting her on her feet, I lifted the toilet seat and reached for my sweatpants hanging loosely around her hips. I’d tied the drawstring to help hold them up, the knot giving me a hard time for a moment.
Her hands went to mine, stopping me from untying it successfully. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice tinted with the faint hints of panic.