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That didn’t loosen the knots tied so tight in his belly. “You will send for me the moment you feel her rise.” He made it an order.
She nodded.
Sevastyan stood, towering over her, feeling as if they hadn’t really sorted anything at all out. There was such a distance between them it may as well have been an entire ocean. He brushed a kiss on top of her head, but she didn’t even look up. Cursing, he stalked into the bedroom, changed and stormed out, leaving behind instructions to his bodyguards, and then went to talk to his cousin.
Mitya was waiting in his office. Ania was curled up on the little bench seat by the window. She looked very nervous and she got up as Sevastyan entered, going to him and putting her arms around him. “Mitya told me what happened yesterday. I’m so sorry. Flambé was already so troubled. I should have stayed.”
Sevastyan frowned down at her. “What do you mean she was already so troubled?”
Ania gave him another hug and went back to her seat at the window. “She’s confused about whether or not her female and your male made the right choice. They’re both very scared. I think she’s witnessed a tremendous amount of shifter abuse.”
Sevastyan lifted his head alertly. That made sense. “She got more of that here.” He knew he was being unfair, but rage was too close and fear of losing Flambé too great. He wanted to blame Mitya. He wanted it to be his cousin’s fault, but he knew it was really his own. “Exactly why the hell do you dislike her so much, Mitya?” he demanded, whirling around to face his cousin. Even that was a silly question. He knew why.
“She doesn’t love you. You deserve to be loved.” Mitya shoved his chair back from his desk so hard it fell over backward. “You can be as angry as you want, Sevastyan, but it’s the truth. I’ve watched her from the beginning. I tried to warn you. I know you’re tired of being alone. I know you need to go to that club and work your aggression out on whatever the hell you do there, but some little submissive willing to play her part just to get off because you’re hot in bed isn’t the same as someone who will be devoted to you because she loves you. I want that for you. She doesn’t touch you. She won’t hold your hand or touch your face, or lean into you. There’s nothing at all. Nothing. She gives you nothing and I want so much more for you.”
That was all true. Sevastyan couldn’t say it wasn’t. He was suddenly damned tired.
“Mitya.” Ania’s voice was the calm in the middle of the storm. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing or saying to Flambé, but I can assure you, she does very much care for Sevastyan. She might not want to. She’s afraid. I’d go so far as to say she’s terrified. Forgive me, Sevastyan, but there was so much fear that I even asked her if you had harmed her in some way, when I can’t imagine you harming any woman. She has really been traumatized by shifters, male shifters. I asked her about female friends and her answer was very strange. She said they were gone or dead. I thought that was extremely interesting—and sad.”
“You didn’t follow up?” Mitya demanded.
Ania didn’t so much as flinch at his tone. “I didn’t dare. She was on the verge of flight. I wanted to make certain she saw me as a friend. She needs one. I thought if we spent time together, she might relax enough to confide in me. It might not be then, but eventually. At one point, her leopard was close, pushing very near to the surface. I could see it hurt her. Not like it does when one first shifts, but just the closeness of her leopard beneath her skin.”
Sevastyan rubbed his arms as if he could soothe Flambé. “For some reason, her nerve endings seem too close or something. I’m going to have the doc look into it. She says they burn all the time. It gets so much worse when her leopard pushes close. Her mother bled to death in childbirth. I suspect that’s how their species has mostly died out. The doc wants her to do some testing. He says he can start her on shots to help her blood clot.”
“Why wouldn’t her father have done that when she was just a child?” Mitya asked.
“That’s a very good question,” Sevastyan said. “But I’m not certain of any of this.”
“When her leopard was close, I had mine talk to hers. It was quick, but Flamme, that’s her leopard’s name, is very certain of Sevastyan’s leopard. She thinks he can protect them. She believes Flambé cares a lot for Sevastyan but is so afraid that she may take them too far away and he will never find them. Never. The leopards never can. That’s what she said. The leopards never can. What could that mean?”
There was a long silence. Mitya held out his hand to Ania. She put her smaller hand in his immediately. Mitya shook his head and sighed, shoving at his hair with his free hand. “I’m sorry, Sevastyan. This entire mess is my fault. I should have given her the benefit of the doubt and trusted your judgment. She’s so reserved. And small. I think I always pictured you with this lioness of a woman and one who gives you hell, kind of like Ashe does Timur. What a mess.” He sank down on the window seat beside his wife and looked at her. “Tell me what you think I should do to fix this.”
Sevastyan thought it was significant that Mitya didn’t ask him what should be done. He trusted Ania’s advice more. Sevastyan should have gone to Ania for advice as well before he had thoroughly fucked up the relationship.
“You’re going to have to go to her and apologize and tell her why you were such an ass, Mitya. Tell her you were worried about Sevastyan and why.”
Mitya groaned. “He has to take back that he won’t work as my head of security.”
“No, he doesn’t. You were an ass to Flambé and she deserves an apology and you know it,” Ania said. “Stop trying to get out of an apology to Sevastyan. You have to do that as well. One has nothing to do with the other.”
Mitya looked at him, clearly steeling himself to make the ultimate sacrifice. Sevastyan stopped him, shaking his head and even stepping back. “Don’t. Not yet. We’ve got a couple of things we need to hash out before either of us talks about apologies.”
Mitya stood again and this time he tugged Ania to her feet, his gaze steady on Sevastyan’s face, knowing the discussion he was going to force between them was going to be an ugly one.
Mitya brought Ania’s knuckles to his mouth and kissed them. “If you don’t mind, kotyonok, I would very much like to speak to my cousin alone.”
“Of course, honey, just know that I love him dearly, and I want to be able to have both Sevastyan and Flambé to dinner at our house sometime in the future.” She went up on her toes, brushed a kiss on her husband’s jaw and left the den.
The office was spacious, but when two large men with big male leopards in their primes faced off in adversarial positions, that space became small immediately. Mitya put the length of the room between them.
“This has to do with Rolan? Your father?”
“You know very well Rolan is not my father,” Sevastyan accused. “When I was a teenager, I told myself you didn’t know, that I was protecting you from that knowledge. I quickly came to realize after habitually being subjected to beatings by both Rolan and Lazar, and their lieutenants, that there was no way Lazar, in his cruelty, wouldn’t have informed you or your mother of what he had done.”
Sevastyan’s gaze, banded with heat, never left Mitya’s. Shturm was close. They trained with the best every day. They never stopped. He loved Mitya, but betrayal was an ugly thing. In their family, fathers turned on mothers and daughters and even sons and nephews, killing them. It was the norm in his world.
“Yes,” Mitya admitted softly, “I knew. Lazar rubbed it in my mother’s face one night when Rolan’s wife came over pregnant. Rolan was out of town and Tatiana, your mother, was staying with us. Lazar kept taunting her, saying he was going to tell Rolan and Rolan would beat her until she lost the baby. His laughter was so ugly. I remember thinking how disgusting he was and how lucky she would be if she lost the baby. He wouldn’t have anything to hold over her head.”
“But he didn’t tell Rolan.”
“No, he didn’t. So, after she had you, Lazar forced Tatiana to sl
eep with him. He’d make her come to the house and bring you. I’d have to take care of you while he took Mom and her into the bedroom. Sometimes he wouldn’t go into the bedroom so he could show me what two women could do together to pleasure a man. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about killing you, killing us both, so those two women would be free of him. So we would be free of him.”
Mitya turned away from Sevastyan, balling his hands into two tight fists. “When you were not even a year and half, he liked kicking you around in front of the women. Hard. Beating you with his fists. He wanted me to join in. He would let his leopard out to threaten to eat you. When I wouldn’t help him, he let his leopard loose on me or the women. He was a fucking dick. A monster.” He turned back to Sevastyan. “He didn’t get much better as you got older, although he never beat you when Rolan was around. When did you find out?”
“I was a teenager. Lazar told Rolan. He was so smug. Rolan made the mistake of having his lair be too prosperous and other lairs took note of it. We’d swallowed two smaller territories that were right on the harbors and that gave us more control than Lazar. We also had taken a small but very critical piece of land that bordered the main highway controlling the railway.”
Mitya studied his face for a long time before speaking. “You were fifteen years old and you were already that fucking smart, Sevastyan. You told Rolan exactly what he needed to do to get the advantage over the other vors, didn’t you? You were the one running the business. That’s why the arms deals were suddenly going so smoothly and no one could figure out where the weapons were being kept. Lazar was going crazy. He tried to bribe so many of Rolan’s top men, but by the time he hit the location, the weapons were gone.”
Sevastyan couldn’t help but hear the pride in his voice, but that didn’t matter to him now. He hadn’t once taken his eyes from Mitya. His gaze hadn’t wavered, the heat still as white-hot as ever. Trapped inside his soul, a crimson rage blazed a molten fire so deep and strong he knew it would never be put out. He waited for the answer. He needed to know the why of it.
He had Lazar’s venom running in his veins. He knew that. Mitya knew it. They both shared a legacy of brutality and cruelty. There was no denying Sevastyan had borne the brunt of the hatred and ire of both Rolan and Lazar. He had aided Rolan in outsmarting Lazar only to have Lazar gleefully spew his secret truth—that Sevastyan was Lazar’s son, not Rolan’s. At the same time, there was no denying that, as Lazar’s son, Mitya lived in hell every minute of the day.
“Yes, I took over running the lair, although completely behind the scenes,” Sevastyan admitted. “Rolan was a good fighter, but he wasn’t good at planning battles and worse at business. I could see the bigger picture. Once Lazar told him the truth, that I was his son, not Rolan’s, Rolan despised me. He took every opportunity to find ways to hurt me. He needed me, but he hated me. He threatened to kill you all the time. He hated you almost more than he hated me. He thought you mattered to Lazar. He knew I didn’t. Hell, even Rolan used to worry that Lazar was too ugly to you, too hard on you, but it never bothered him when Lazar kicked the crap out of me or my leopard. It wasn’t like I mattered to any of them. Not Rolan. Not Lazar. And certainly not to you.”
Mitya’s eyebrow shot up. “You’re changing history, Sevastyan, and I’m not sure why. You might have the right to ask questions, but think back. Who stood in front of you? Who took beatings for you? Later, when you were a teen, you watched my back, that’s true, but we did it for each other.”
Sevastyan shoved both hands through his hair in agitation. Over the years, he’d come to accept that his role was always to be in the background. He found he preferred it that way, but the rage in him built and built. The more the others heaped their cruel brutal beatings and forced him to fight, the more his leopard learned in the battles to protect his human. Sevastyan learned to fight as well, to become proficient in all weapons until he was a killing machine just as his leopard was. He was exactly what Rolan and Lazar had shaped him into.
“I tried to counter what they did to you, but I was in a different lair, Sevastyan, not around you as much as I would have liked,” Mitya pointed out. “You often heard things before I did. More than once you took my back, and I thought it was because of our relationship, that you knew, like I did, that we only had each other.”
Sevastyan didn’t think that deserved an answer. “You had plenty of opportunities to acknowledge the relationship, but you didn’t. Not once. In fact, you avoided me for the most part. You seemed to have an aversion to me unless you needed someone to fight with you or go out on a drug raid.”
Mitya shrugged. “You were the best. The fastest. The deadliest. You still are. I don’t know another shifter capable of taking you down. In a battle, I’m going to choose to have the best with me every time. That made perfect sense and no one would question my choice or my reason for choosing to have you with me. And I didn’t want you left behind alone in either lair.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” Mitya sounded annoyed, the way he often did. “No one could be better than Lazar. You were a kid, Sevastyan. A big kid, maybe, all muscle, but you were still a kid. Already you had a reputation, and it was growing too fast. How do you think he was going to react to hearing about some kid being the best? The deadliest? The fastest? You were already getting a reputation as someone the women liked being with. They didn’t run screaming from you. They smiled and flirted with you. That was going to get you killed in a very ugly way. And if he ever found out you were the one running Rolan’s lair, his business, besting Lazar, he would have emptied a gun in your belly and then let his leopard devour you.”
Sevastyan knew that was all the truth. Lazar had an ego that wouldn’t stop. Sevastyan hadn’t helped Rolan succeed in running the lair so efficiently to please Rolan or make money; it was to best Lazar. To know he was undercutting him at every turn. Taking away his business slowly.
Sevastyan studied Lazar’s territory and all of his imports and exports. He knew where he kept his weapons and drugs. He knew the pipelines and the routes he used for trafficking. Systematically he began to interrupt them. He was careful and used only those men he could trust. He stashed any contraband in places no one would think to look and then stayed quiet while Lazar and his men went crazy looking everywhere. Their leopards were let loose to track, but Sevastyan used scent blockers and he mixed up scents to throw the leopards off.
“I protected you the only way I could, making sure to take you on every raid if he wasn’t with me,” Mitya said, “and leaving you behind if he was.”
“You left, Mitya, when Fyodor did, after he killed his father and wiped out his lair, but you never said one word to me. You never sent for me, or asked me to go with you. You left me there to face both of them alone.”
Sevastyan’s tone was mild. His dominant voice. The one he used that was low, almost soft, that played over nerve endings, but carried his absolute will. He didn’t sound as if he might leap across the room in a full-out attack, but Shturm was waiting, prowling, pushing so close when Sevastyan closed his fist his nails dug into his palms like claws.
“I got out with my life and nothing else. There was no time to get word to you or anyone else. Lazar heard Patva was dead and he raced to the lair to see for himself. I got out while I could. The rumors were flying about Fyodor, Gorya and Timur. I hoped you got out and when you finally joined me, I welcomed you.”
“But you never once acknowledged me.”
“Lazar wasn’t dead. Rolan wasn’t dead. As long as either was alive, I wasn’t going to give them more reason to want you dead. You’re a killing machine, Sevastyan. You’re intelligent and you can do things I can’t. I spent most of my life protecting you whether or not you want to acknowledge or believe that. You’re all the family I had until Ania. I wasn’t going to allow Lazar to take you away from me. I knew the moment Lazar thought you were important to me he would move heaven and earth to kill you. The same with
Rolan. So, I never gave that to them.”
“Or to me. You could have acknowledged to me that you knew I was your brother and that it mattered to you. They weren’t here and I was. It mattered to me, Mitya.”
“True. I could have. Or you could have. But you didn’t. Instead, you chose to be head of security. I wasn’t about to give you an excuse to leave. And you would have. If I had let Fyodor and the others know you were my brother, you would have left.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re an arrogant bastard, Sevastyan, mean as a snake, worse even than I am. You know it and so do I. Half the time you’re just looking for a fight. You’re intelligent and your brain needs to stay active. You have to have sex all the time in order not to rip someone to pieces and it has to be your way. Everything has to be your way. You take control of everything around you. Do you really believe that had I come out and acknowledged you as my brother that you wouldn’t have manufactured an excuse and left? You would have. You don’t want to be on equal terms with me. You don’t want anyone to look at you and see you.”
Maybe everything Mitya said was the truth, but that didn’t stop Sevastyan from wanting to rip his face off. Or have the satisfaction of punching his fist right through his mouth and feel the familiar crunch of teeth breaking.
“You still should have made that acknowledgment, Mitya,” Sevastyan said, not knowing why it was so important Mitya understand that someone had to see him. Just one damn person.
Mitya regarded him for a long time in silence and then he finally shook his head. “You don’t get it, Sevastyan. I’ve acknowledged you from the moment I found out your mother was pregnant with you. I acknowledged you when I took care of you and he hurt our mothers. I have always acknowledged you. I’ve always known you were my brother. I’ve always looked out for you, whether you thought so or not. I might not be the best at showing it, or saying it, but you’re my brother and no one is going to harm you while I’m around. Why the hell do you think I made such an ass of myself around Flambé?”