“Anything you have to say to Irina, you can say in front of me. We don’t have any secrets,” I said, gathering her hair in my hand gently and sweeping it off her neck. She leaned into the touch, seeking out the affection that we’d both come to crave.
I’d never been able to touch someone the way that I could touch Irina, as if her suicide attempt had freed me from the fear of her violating me. Maybe it was the knowledge that she’d been through the same experience as I had; maybe it was knowing that she loved me.
All I knew for certain was that I couldn’t stop touching her.
“Irina?” her father asked, putting the choice in her hands. My fingers tightened on her waist, my grip twitching as I thought of what I would do if she asked me to go. I didn’t want to disobey her wishes, but I also wouldn’t be able to leave her alone to listen to her father twist what we shared into something wrong.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said, nodding her head. “I’m sure Scar is already prepared for your scathing lecture about how inappropriate our relationship is.”
“He’s taking advantage of you when you’re vulnerable,” Judge Ryan said, seeming completely unaffected by his daughter’s sharp tongue and even sharper wit. I imagined he’d grown entirely used to it, dealing with her regularly for her twenty-six years of life.
I’d never met a woman more capable of cutting a man down with nothing but the words on her tongue.
“He hasn’t touched me like that,” Irina sighed, hanging her head as if she was already tired of the conversation. Protectiveness surged in me, not solely for the fact that he’d dared to challenge my place in her life or insinuate that my attentions were anything less than honorable.
But because I’d been the one to hold her every time she broke down into tears. I’d been the one to help her wash the stains of her abuser off her skin. I’d been the one to force-feed her when she’d given up on life, watching over her constantly to prevent her from trying to escape into death again.
There was nothing more honorable than wanting to save her from herself, even if it was because my heart couldn’t beat without her and I couldn’t draw air into my lungs when she wasn’t with me.
“It’s clearly only a matter of time,” Judge Ryan said, dropping his gaze to Irina’s position draped over my lap. She was comfortable, lounging against me with her leg propped up, but everything in her went tense at his words.
“Scar and I were an item months ago. Long before I was taken,” Irina said, her words twisting what we’d been into something more palatable for her father. We hadn’t dated, not with my head shoved so far up my own ass that I’d taken her for granted, but we had been intimate. I’d felt her from the inside, and it was something that time could never erase from my memory.
“Irina,” Judge Ryan sighed in disappointment. The confirmation of everything he must have suspected but didn’t want to admit hung in the room, as if he couldn’t believe his own child would be so foolish as to be involved with a Bellandi.
“Why did you think I was so furious when you came here and told us she’d been taken? Do you think I would react so extremely for every woman who came to harm because of the war with Murphy? As tragic as it might be, that reaction was for Irina alone,” I said. Her body relaxed, her face turning toward mine in confusion.
It was undoubtedly the first she’d heard of the rampage I’d embarked on when I couldn’t get to her.
“I wasn’t thinking properly that night,” he admitted, nodding as if the pieces finally clicked into place.
“As much as I would love to claim to be a vigilante for all the women of Chicago, I don’t often cut out the eyeballs of my enemies to collect in a jar. That’s all for her, so she knows that every man who watched him violate her has lost the ability to see, as well as their lives when Rafael is done playing with them.”
Irina stilled on my lap, her face shocked as I dropped my gaze to hers with the words, the confession of the vow I’d taken to bring her a trophy of every man that had taken from her.
Eyeballs in a jar. A head at her feet.
Names on my list scrawled in red.
Judge Ryan raised his hands, shaking his head to remind me that he couldn’t know the details of what was done. His oath was too rigid, his purpose too strict. Turning a blind eye to the crimes of the Bellandis was the only way he could cooperate with them.
“I think you should come home,” he said to his daughter. “My home is safe.”
“This is her home now,” I said, pressing my fingers into Irina’s side to warn her to remain silent. She could claim not to want to live with me all she wanted in private, but when her father was around, she would behave and remember what could happen if he tried to interfere.
I would hate to cost Matteo the judge in his pocket. They were difficult to pay off, but replaceable in the end. There was only one Irina. What was another murdered parent on my list written in red?
She nodded wordlessly, biting her lip. “This is where I need to be right now.” It wasn’t the declaration of a lifetime with me that I would have asked for, but it was all I’d get for the time being.
Sometimes, victory came in phases. That was my first.
Irina and I remained on the sofa, lounging in comfort with a romantic comedy on the flat screen. I wanted to stab out my eyeballs. How she could tolerate this sappy bullshit was beyond me, but she laughed and cried in perfect time as if she was experiencing it all herself.
It reminded me of the fact that she felt things more strongly. That her emotional pain cut her to the bone.
But it also meant that she loved more fully than anyone I’d ever met, and I knew one day I’d be on the receiving end of all that love, when she finally allowed herself to feel it and openly express it without fear of me walking away.
She cried softly as the movie ended, turning to bury her face in my neck. The moisture of her tears made something inside me clench, wishing I could erase the pain from her even if it had been caused by a happy ending.
She’d have her own one day, when she was ready. I hoped it would be sooner than later. I might not have been able to tie her to me in the same way the Bellandis usually did, but she would be my wife all the same.
We just wouldn’t have children to unite us permanently. There’d be no little girl with her bright green eyes to stare up at me. While I didn’t regret the choice to have a vasectomy, because genes like mine should never be passed on to a child, I did regret that Irina would never have what she must surely want more than anything.
Watching her love children so fully made my heart hurt for what I wouldn’t, couldn’t, give her.
I’d give her anything but that.
“What’s wrong, Butterfly?” I asked, running my hand through her hair softly when her tears didn’t seem to ease.
“You’ve taken such good care of me,” she murmured, sniffling past the tears. She dug her face in harder, as if she could crawl inside me. “I don’t deserve it.”
“What are you talking about?” I hissed, wrapping her hair in my grip and pulling back. Her stunning face finally came into view, her lips parted in shock as I manhandled her the way I’d done without hesitation before she was taken.