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He came here tonight with betrayal in his heart where warmth used to be, and now it’s too late.
“Why didn’t you want to come home, Viktoriya?” Zevran demands. “Why didn’t you long to be reunited with your loving family? Your powerful connections? The life of a woman whose husband can afford men like me?”
Those pale, deadly eyes are locked onto my profile like a laser.
“Because you’re not Viktoriya Morozova, spoiled Bratva princess, and the woman I was paid to collect,” he says, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper against my ear. “What you are is a goddamn liar, Cora Banks.”
16
Cora
Cora Banks.
Hearing my name on his lips, my real name, makes me shake. Full-body trembles against Zevran’s broad chest. It feels like a dismissal. He wanted Viktoriya Morozova, spoiled and high maintenance. He wanted a Bratva princess with powerful enemies and a dangerous husband.
A woman worth going to war over. A fantasy he let himself believe in.
I feel the angry heat blazing from him. He squeezes the gun grip, each of his tattooed fingers flexing against the cold steel.
The gun he’s going to lift to my temple any second now and pull the trigger.
Because I’m just Cora.
People aren’t willing to spend eye-watering amounts of money to rescue me. I’m not worth being chased back and forth across the country.
I’m nothing.
I’m no one.
I’m completely, utterly screwed.
17
Zevran
Cora Banks, maiden name Sky. Twenty years old. High school dropout. She grew up barely a mile from this shitty kitchen and has never owned a passport. Her resume is a smattering of fast-food restaurant jobs before she got married eight months ago to this piece of shit, Troy Banks. Her father was never in the picture. Her mother died nearly a year ago.
I can guess how a loser like Troy managed to lock down a beauty like Cora. By taking advantage of her grief and her low self-esteem while she was at rock bottom.
She’s shaking against my chest—shuddering in my arms like she’s back on that motel floor next to the shattered coffeepot. I fight the overwhelming instinct to hold her tighter, because I need to focus, and we haven’t yet reached the reason why I’m here.
I catalog her methodically, looking for damage. The broken wrist is still in its cast, healing. The bruise along her cheekbone from the basement has faded to a faint yellow shadow. The bruise the trooper left on her face, the one I swore would be the last mark anyone ever put on her, is also fading.
My eyes drop to her throat and the faint finger marks I put there myself when she sank her teeth into my hand. A sharp pang of remorse twists in my gut. I’m a man who inflicts violence for a living, but looking at the marks I left on her delicate skin makes me feel like a fucking monster. I choked her. I terrified her. I let my temper get the best of me with a girl who had already been broken by everyone in her life, and the shame of it burns white-hot.
I swore I’d never let anyone hurt her again, yet I had been one of the bastards who did.
My gaze fastens on a fresh red mark on her temple that wasn’t there when she drove away from me at that gas station. There’s also a bruise ringing her upper arm, four distinct fingermarks pressed into her pale skin. That tells me exactly what Troy’s first move was when she walked back through the door.
The last mark anyone would put on her. That’s what I swore.
She left me at a gas station and drove straight back to a man who beats her, and the first thing he did when he saw her was put his hands on her, because I wasn’t there to stop it.
The anger in my chest doubles and then triples. It becomes something that has teeth.
“You didn’t run far, printsessa,” I murmur, but my attention has moved to Troy. “Is this really the only place you had to go?”
I know it is, and I know why without her having to tell me. A big part of my job is pulling women out of shitty situations, and over the years, I’ve thought hard about why they sometimes stay in them. I’ve always kept this understanding at arm’s length, but with Cora, I can’t.
