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?”
