Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 980(@200wpm)___ 784(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 980(@200wpm)___ 784(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
I see him steel himself for what he has to say, knowing that he needs to say it now or he never will. “Neither one made it, Babybear. I was charged with felony manslaughter. My firm got me off on a technicality, but I wasn’t the same.” He meets my eyes. “And my life was in constant danger. The girls…they were daughters of a high-level mob boss. Ironically, not a dissimilar situation to the one Leonard Calfus found himself in.”
“That man only has himself to blame.” I look deep into Daddy’s eyes, letting him know that I’m on his side. “None of this was your fault.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not so sure about that. I moved my parents back to Russia. Things were different there and I set them up to live a good life, everything they needed. I disappeared and became someone else. I had to. Both in order to keep living and to reinvent myself, or try to. Didn’t work completely. I had connections in the underworld from my time at the firm. The rest is history. Dirty history. My parents died a month after I moved them and that set me back on a path of not caring much about anything. It was a car accident. Another irony not lost on me. They were ashamed of who I’d become before they left. What happened to me. But they always loved me. They didn’t want to leave, thought I was ashamed of them, but I couldn’t tell them everything. I had to lie. To protect them. They made me vulnerable. Didn’t do any good. I thought I had it all, but everything I had turned to ashes. I won’t let that happen again. I can’t, baby.” He stares deep into my eyes, forcing me to draw a sharp breath. “It would end me. Losing you, it would end me. Do you get that?”
I’m not sure if it’s listening to the sound of his voice, the way I’ve never heard it before, so sad, so desperate. Or maybe it’s the omelet just isn’t sitting right…but I’m not feeling well at all.
“So now what do we do?” I ask, because I’m not sure in all honesty what’s going to happen to us now that so much truth is out. I’d already told him in bits and pieces, in the car, on the plane and in the bath about my family.
Who I was before I left. The things they did to try to force me to be this perfect Barbie that my grandfather and my family thought I should be. Thought all women should be.
I told him how I left, that I really had no feelings for my family. I saw the flash of something else in his eyes, something he obviously thought he’d kept hidden from me, even while he said he understood and that he would stand by me no matter what.
“We keep going. We concentrate on us. And you let me figure out some stuff. And baby…” He places both hands on either side of my neck as he gets to his feet. I have to strain back to look up at him as he holds my gaze. “I lied to protect you. Do you get that? Same with my parents. It may have been the wrong move, but it was for the right reasons. I tried to protect you, not hurt you.”
“Yes, but do you see now, that doesn’t work? People get hurt. That’s life. And the lying—both of us, I’m including myself—it only keeps distance between us. You’re my person. Someone I never dreamed I could have, but here you are. How do we fix this? How can we be us the way we want to be?”
He swallows hard and brings his lips to rest on the part of my hair and I feel his warm breath there.
“I’ll fix this. If it takes every breath I have, I will fix us. Give us the life I never dreamed about. I never thought something like this was possible, Babybear. I’m not losing you. Or us. Or this. You have to still trust me. Can you do that? Can you trust me?”
He pulls back and stares down at me taking his fingers and fiddling with my glasses. My belly flipping over from the pleading I see in his eyes.
I nod as a wave of heat cascades down my body.
“I can. But Daddy,” I whisper. “I’m sick.”
18
Stas
There was a time, not long ago, that I clung to the smallest part of me that I felt was still human.
The job I’d chosen after the accident put me in contact with every kind of sub-human I could have imagined. But truth is even before that I’d lost my humanity.
And, although I’d never pulled the trigger myself, I’d done enough to know that I prematurely ended lives by my actions or inactions.