by Olivia Gates
His eyes softened with such...adoration. It still felt like the most genuine thing she’d ever known.
“I know all of you. It’s why you have all of me.” Pain entered his gaze. “You must have found out yesterday, must have been coming to tell me when you overheard us.”
As always, he just knew. It had been how he’d manipulated her so seamlessly. “Yeah, I arrived just in time to hear them congratulating you on the adjustment of your plan.”
“If you’d waited you would have heard me blasting them for refusing to believe you were never part of my plan and forbidding them to ever mention you again. Richard is the only one who knows what we have together, and he knew they’d stepped on forbidden territory.” She did remember Graves saying something to that effect. “But I don’t care what they think. I only care about you. I’m here to take you home, meu amor.”
“I can’t...I can’t be with you anymore.”
“You were just with me now. And you’ll always be with me.”
“You know what this was. I’m unable to resist you, but it will kill me to be with you now.”
“Don’t ever say things like that. I’ll give you time to come to terms with all this on the condition you never shut me out again.”
“I’m more valuable now that I’m a dual-purpose instrument, right? A weapon in your revenge, and a vessel for you heir.” Before he voiced his thunderous disapproval of her interpretation, a terrible idea sparked in her mind. A bargain. “But I will do everything you wish, Rafael...if you let your plan to destroy my father go. Whatever that would cost you, I will compensate you.”
He sat up, the animosity she’d always felt and he’d hidden so well on full blast now. “There’s no compensating me for what your father did. And don’t ask what that was. I already told you it has nothing to do with you. And it will remain so.”
Giving up, she left the bed on shaking legs and went to retrieve her clothes. Once she’d pulled on the clean layers, she exited the bathroom to find him blocking her way.
Circumventing him, she stopped at the door. “I can’t stop you, Rafael. But I can stop myself.”
He prowled toward her. “You can’t. You will never stop loving me, just as I will never stop loving you till the day I die.”
“Even if I never do, it makes no difference. What we had, whatever that was, is over.”
“It will never be over between us, Eliana. You’ll always be mine to protect and cherish every second of my life. And I will be there for every second of your pregnancy, and our child will be born with us long married.”
His conviction overwhelmed her. Warding off another wave of nausea, she staggered past him.
She was at the door when he said something else, so calm and final, it made her stumble the rest of the away out of the hotel.
Once outside, she found Daniel there, waiting. In no condition to refuse his services, she entered the luxurious, perfectly air-conditioned limo, slumped in her seat and closed her eyes, Rafael’s last words looping in her mind, deepening her desperation.
He’d said, “Our wedding will take place on time.”
* * *
Knowing it was pointless to keep running from Rafael, that he’d only keep coming after her, Ellie returned to the mansion. But she drew the line at sharing his bed.
He let her choose where she’d stay. She chose the suite as far away from him as possible on ground level, and she was relieved he didn’t try to invade it once she sought its refuge. He was apparently giving her time to “come to terms,” as he’d called it.
But there was no doing that while she mistrusted his motives, didn’t know the secret behind his enmity and expected a catastrophe to befall her father at any moment.
After another day in hell, longing for him and knowing it was a futile effort to again demand he tell her everything, realization descended on her like a hammer.
She knew who could tell her the truth.
His brothers.
* * *
For all their ruthlessness, Ellie was certain Graves, Raiden and Numair loved Rafael.
At least to the extent that those men could love. She bet, whatever they felt, they wouldn’t further jeopardize his plans if they could at all help it.
So she demanded to meet them, threatening that if they told Rafael, it would be on their heads when she left him standing at the altar.
Since Raiden and Numair didn’t think much of her, they couldn’t risk her carrying out her threat and complied. Graves didn’t believe her for a second, but followed suit anyway.
After resorting to elaborate maneuvers to throw Rafael’s surveillance off, she now sat in Graves’s ocean-facing penthouse suite at the Copacabana Palace Hotel. Looking at those three Olympians who sat across from her like some ancient tribunal that would decide her fate, she wondered again how they had so much in common with Rafael.
It felt as if they’d been forged in the same merciless crucible, molded into the same brand of lethal weapon.
Raiden was coolly assessing her, as if deciding on an attack strategy. She had no doubt that when he struck, he did so out of nowhere and turned his opponents to ashes, as his code name, Lightning, suggested.
Numair—Phantom—was every bit his code name, too, chilling, elusive and impossible to fathom. With him no one knew where they stood, and she had a feeling that made him the deadliest of all.
Graves was looking at her with the tolerance someone would have for a posturing cat that didn’t realize it wasn’t so much intimidating as endearing.
She finally sat forward. “Got enough of sizing me up?” When the men just continued staring at her, she blew out a breath. “To business, then. As you so kindly shattered my illusions the other night, you now must finish your task and tell me what Rafael won’t.”
Graves shook his head. “Let it go. Knowing the truth would only hurt you.”
“Is there more hurt than knowing the man I love— the father of my baby—is using me to send my father to prison?”
The men looked at each other. The baby was news to them. So Rafael did consider her forbidden territory he shared with no one. But she felt a baby somehow changed everything to them. The shift in their attitude was almost palpable.
“There is always more hurt, Ms. Ferreira,” Numair said in that hair-raising sereneness. “Some snake pits are better left closed forever.”
She gave a mirthless huff. “Well, this one is wide-open, and serpents have been slithering out all over me. I know you’re here because you’d rather spare Rafael further trouble with me. But if he thinks this is hurting me less, I’m telling you he’s wrong. I can’t live with not knowing.”
Another eloquent glance passed between the men before Graves finally sat forward. It seemed they’d elected him to be their spokesman.
Holding her breath, knowing what she was about to hear would change everything, she hung on to his every word as he started talking.
And she finally understood what they’d meant by saying there was always more hurt. This was a level beyond her worst nightmares.
What happened to Rafael, to all of them, the suffering they’d had to endure... It was beyond her worst nightmares.
Numbness spread in her every cell, an attempt to ward off the horror, to protect her psyche from being torn apart. Imagining Rafael as a child, taken and imprisoned, abused and broken...it was...it was... No way to describe, to take in, to bear...
* * *
Ellie’s eyes fluttered open.
Jackknifing to a sitting position, the whole world heaved around her, making her collapse back. On a bed. It had to be Graves’s hotel bed.
“Dammit,” she moaned as she struggled to sit up. Hands on both sides helped her. Raiden’s and Numair’s. “I’ve never even felt dizzy all my life, and now I faint every weekday.”
<
br /> “You must promise you’ll never tell Rafael of this.” Graves’s intimidating face came into wavering focus as he stood at the foot of the bed. “He can’t find out you were in my bed, under any circumstances. I’m fond of certain anatomical parts.”
She looked up at him, at the other two, and tears gushed from her depths.
The men’s consternation rose as sobs almost tore her apart before their eyes. These men who’d vanquished the world’s evils had no way of dealing with a woman’s tears. As they fidgeted and exchanged anxious glances, it was clear they would have rather been dealing with a ticking bomb.
But she couldn’t help it. The more she imagined the atrocities that had befallen Rafael all those years ago, the more violent her weeping became.
Her distress soon overpowered the men’s ability to withstand it, and they took refuge in action. Swarming around her, she found herself propped by pillows from all sides, and they were blotting her tears, bathing her burning face in cold compresses, warming her freezing hands in heated ones and offering her every comfort food and drink that existed in Rio.
Limp with anguish, she surrendered to their ministrations, all but the dietary one. At the first warning heave, they rushed to take ingestible stuff away. She had a feeling they would rather get shot than deal with that.
It felt like hours before she was finally drained of all her tears, and lay there barely managing the in-out motions of breathing. The men seemed just as depleted, sitting around the bed as if they’d been through a thirty-round fight with a gorilla.
“Please tell us you’re done crying,” Raiden groaned.
Her breath hitched. As they all tensed again, she only nodded. There was nothing more in her. For now.
Exhaling in relief, Graves said, “How is it possible a woman your size has all that water in her?”
“Speaking of water.” Raiden grimaced at the memory as he fetched a carafe. “You need to replace the rivers you lost.”
Contradictorily the one who looked most rattled by her weeping storm, Numair warned, “Sip it slowly. Otherwise, you might choke. Or throw up. Or both. Or do some other catastrophic thing. Like burst into another crying jag.”
As she did as instructed, Numair regarded her heavily. “That was for Rafael. You can’t bear imagining what he’s been through.”
Her breath hitched again. “And that I can’t do anything about it.”
Numair exchanged a look with Raiden. Then he shook his head. “You do love him.”
She looked at both men through almost swollen-shut lids. “You figured this out on your own?”
And she saw what she’d thought impossible. A semblance of a smile on Numair’s cruel lips. “It was a long-shot deduction.”
Suddenly, it all crashed into place. “Rafael thinks my father had a hand in his abduction!”
Exchanging another of those glances, and making another decision, Numair was the one who told her the details.
This time there were no tears. Just conviction. It made her sit up steady. “No way my father did that!”
Raiden shrugged. “Rafael has evidence.”
Slumping back with this new blow, she felt her world churning.
Graves, who’d been silent for a while, came forward, checking her temperature.
She clung to his hand. “I need to know more.”
Another shared glance between the men, then Graves asked, “What do you need to know?”
“These aren’t your real names.”
He shook his head. “They are our names now.”
“How did Rafael pick his name?”
“He was wounded on a mission. Bones, our medical expert, performed a desperate field surgery on him, removed his kidney and spleen to stem his internal bleeding, thinking he’d die anyway. But he recovered fully as if by an act of God.”
“Rafael. God has healed...”
At Graves’s nod, another sob tore her. That scar. She’d felt it resonate with such...pain, such...loss. She’d been right. Oh, God, Rafael...all he’d lost, all he’d survived...
“He picked Moreno Salazar,” Raiden said. “Dark old house, just as I chose Kuroshiro, which means black castle in Japanese, as a sort of twisted tribute to our being the product of this ancient, sinister place where we were imprisoned and created.”
“Before you told me all that,” she whispered, “I was thinking you did feel as if you’ve been forged in the same hell.”
“I’m beginning to see why Rafael fell for you,” Raiden said, that assessment in his eyes tinged with approval.
“He didn’t. He was just using me.”
Graves waved her words away as if they were rubbish. “He fell for you. All the way. I was there that first night he did. I can’t begin to explain how it happened, but it certainly did.” At her mournful disbelief, he growled, “Bloody hell, the man went prematurely gray with fright over you. What more proof do you need?”
Silver had appeared in his temples after her accident. Rafael had waved the coincidence away, but she’d believed it just the same...until she’d overheard that fateful conversation. Believing it again, believing he loved her, made things worse not better.
Shying away from the implications, she sought a diversion. “If Rafael is Brazilian by birth, why didn’t he make Brazil his base of operations all along?”
“His homeland was always the one place he didn’t want to be,” Numair explained. “He’s one of only three of us who know their family, but when we first escaped, he couldn’t contact his, fearing the Organization might be keeping them under surveillance in case he returned to them. Then he found that his parents got divorced after his abduction, remarried and had more children. But even when we established our new identities, he didn’t want to disrupt their lives all over again.”
That was also what he’d told her, just without the compelling reasons that had stopped him from seeking his family again. It hadn’t been a choice but a necessity that had been forced on him.
“He thought he’d become someone totally different from the boy they’d lost,” Graves said. “He still believes they’re better off not knowing the man he’s become. For years, he watched them from afar, but I guess I wore him down because he finally reentered their lives a couple of years ago. Though the stubborn boy only did so with his new identity and remains a peripheral acquaintance.”
Even when he’d finally sought his family, he settled for the comfort of seeing them up close...as a stranger.
“But he’s in Brazil now as some sort of poetic justice,” Raiden interjected. “Because this was where he was taken, where it started, and it’s where he wants to exact his revenge, where he wants it to end.”
That fist perpetually wringing her heart tightened.
This was all beyond comprehension, beyond endurance. Even if he’d manipulated her, he had an overwhelming reason for it. What had been done to him had been monstrous, unforgiveable, irreparable.
But it couldn’t have been her father who’d done it.
It couldn’t.
* * *
“Rafael...”
He could swear he’d felt Eliana the moment she’d thought of seeking him. But he’d curbed the urge to stampede toward her. If she didn’t give herself voluntarily, it would mean nothing.
But she was seeking him now, standing there on his threshold looking as if she was in deep mourning.
“I know everything.”
He rose slowly to his feet, gritting his teeth on the surge of dismay. “I’ll skin them alive.”
She approached, and it took all the self-restraint he had not to obliterate the distance and crush her in his arms.
“I insisted I wouldn’t go through with the wedding if they didn’t tell me.” She stopped two feet away, red-rimmed eyes filled with a world of pain, reproach and
...empathy? “You were wrong to hide the truth from me.”
“I’d rather you hate me than your father.” Surprise flitted across her pale, haggard face. Apparently, that motive hadn’t even occurred to her. “I thought I’d manage to break through your resentment in time, but I didn’t want the world you’ve built on your belief in your father to come crashing down. Even when I punished him, I wanted you to continue thinking of me as the villain, not him.”
She surged forward, gripped his arms. Even though her touch was distraught, it felt like sustenance when he was starving.
“But you have to be wrong, Rafael. My father isn’t a villain. And he would die before he harmed a child.”
Her butchered protest told him if he insisted to the contrary, he risked sundering what remained of their tenuous emotional bond.
Everything inside her had been damaged; everything between them hung by a thread. She was still unable to stop loving or wanting him, but it was still possible he’d exacerbate her injuries, making them incurable, and end up losing her altogether.
He’d die before he did.
There was only one venue open to him now.
He took it. “I’m open to giving your father every benefit of the doubt, and to uncovering new evidence. However long it may take to find it. Is that acceptable to you?”
And this being who was everything to him looked at him with those eyes that were his world and nodded.
He crushed her in his arms at last, her feel reclaiming him from the wasteland of separation.
“Will you marry me now?”
Eleven
Eliana had agreed to resume their wedding plans.
But it seemed her faith in his feelings was still damaged, or at least hadn’t recovered yet. There had been no return to intimacy between them.
Rafael couldn’t push. Not when everything inside her felt doused, no matter how passionate and attentive he was. All he could think was that she still thought everything he did for her was self-serving, that she continued to think herself an instrument to serve his purposes. First vengeance and now the child he couldn’t wait to have, a child to give the life he’d been deprived of.