I shake my head. “How did I not see you for the monster you are?”
“You were too busy seeing the back of your skull every time I made you come.”
I back away from him, trying to muster up the right amount of hate for the man standing in front of me. I need to hate him; I have to.
I wait for the black emotion to fester and cement itself in my soul.
But it never comes.
Even after everything he’d just said, I can’t make my feelings for him disappear. Instead, I keep looking for a way in, a window into the man I thought I’d glimpsed back when I’d believed falling in love wasn’t the black hole that it is.
“Don’t hurt them,” I say in a small voice.
“You’re the one who holds that power,” he says simply. Almost sadly.
Then he grabs me and throws me roughly over his shoulder. I scream and rail at his back, but he ignores me as he carries me up the staircase and towards my room.
He swings me off his shoulder and throws me on the bed. I flop around gracelessly. By the time I manage to straighten up, he’s already gone.
I hear the turn of the lock and then… silence.
Broken only by the sound of my rising heartbeat as guilt and regret take hold.
9
LEO
I bury the axe in the trunk, sending shards of bark flying. Before the dust even settles, I yank the blade free and hack at the stump all over again.
“Jesus Christ, Leo!” Gaiman approaches me cautiously from the left.
He keeps his distance. Probably because I’m swinging an ax around. But it’s not going anywhere. My grip is strong, even if anger has made my technique sloppy.
“Leo, for fuck’s sake, just stop!” Gaiman says, when I don’t halt my hacking at the sight of him. “Fuck, man.”
I keep going until I’ve split the stump in two. Once it’s completely destroyed, I throw the axe onto a fresh bed of snow. It sinks beneath the powder.
“I take it dinner didn’t go well,” he says wryly.
“I got the truth she was hiding.”
The moon is perched high above us, radiating silver light over the entire mountain range. It’s bright up here, and somehow even that is pissing me off.
Gaiman approaches slowly and leans against a tree. “Tell me.”
“The baby… the boy.” I’m still panting from trying and failing to burn off the anger inside of me. “He’s alive.”
His jaw drops. “What?”
“She lied to me about the miscarriage. She had my baby,” I growl. “And then she told me he fucking died.”
“Jesus,” Gaiman whispers, looking up towards the moon.
“I knew it,” I continue. “I knew that my son was out there. I just didn’t think she could lie so goddamn convincingly.”
In that way, I underestimated her. I won’t make that mistake again.
“She’s had a crash course in deception,” Gaiman points out. “We always knew that Anya Mikhailov was no sleeping dog.”
“I was going to keep the bitch out of it,” I snarl. “But now she’s placed herself right in the middle of my war.”
Gaiman tenses noticeably.
I’m not in the mood for tact tonight. “What?” I snap. “Spit it out.
“Do we have the resources to go after both Anya Mikhailov and Belov?”
“I don’t give a shit if we do or not. She has my fucking son!”
I yell the last word. It echoes across the mountains. Birds caw and flock out of the trees. Gaiman isn’t perturbed. His expression is calm and measured, unshakeable as the mountains around us.
I’m glad he’s the one who found me here. Jax is useless in moments like these. All he knows how to do is make stupid jokes that me want to rip his head off with my bare hands.
“Leo, I know. We have to get the boy back,” Gaiman says quietly. “But we also need to be smart about this. We have to ask ourselves: is he in danger with her?”
“She’s a Mikhailov. The answer is self-evident.”
“She’s also his grandmother.”
The knowledge is a little bitter now that I’m confronted with it, but it’s the bargain I entered into. “That doesn’t mean I trust her.”
“Neither do I. But that’s not the point,” Gaiman argues. “We don’t need to trust her. We just need to trust her with him. At least for now. At least until we can deal with Belov.”
“He’s still weak. It can wait.”
“He is for now,” Gaiman agrees. “But he’s rebuilding fast. He’s going to hit us back for taking those two buildings down. You know that as well as I do. We didn’t cripple him with a second blow while he was at his weakest, so we lost some time.”