contact until it’s over. I send them messages from both your phones regularly to reassure them.”
So he’d really covered every angle. Still, her breath came out in painful spurts as she imagined their families. Three weeks had passed since their abrupt disappearance. “They must still be going mad with worry.”
His frown darkened. “I know. I try my best to placate them but I can only postpone their devastation, as this served many purposes.”
Unable to contain her frustration anymore, she seethed. “What purposes? Why won’t you let me contact them? Why don’t you want the police involved even now? What—”
He cut off her agitated questions, his voice and gaze soothing, compelling. “Because I needed to keep the assassins’ masters in the dark about what happened until I dealt with them all.”
“That’s why you didn’t take us to a regular hospital and had Dr. Balducci take charge of us there?”
His eyes flooded with what looked like relief, that she’d reached that conclusion. “I couldn’t even take you to one of his publicly known medical facilities where you could have been seen and recognized. I had to make sure those involved in the crime would never pose danger to you or anyone of yours, or anyone at all, ever again.” At the fresh surge of tears in her eyes, he gritted his teeth again. “I know now I should have told you more of this sooner. But I still wouldn’t have let you contact your family. It would have placed them in danger if they’d learned any of it before I concluded everything.”
“And did you? Conclude everything?”
“I’m putting the finishing touches on it all today.”
This probably meant far worse than she, in her previously oblivious life, could imagine. Even now, she couldn’t speculate on what he was doing. But after finding out the truth of the big picture, she no longer wanted to know the details.
But one thing she did know—Ivan was unstoppable. Whatever it took to end this with no more damage or danger to her or any of Alex’s loved ones, he would do it. He’d already done it, was just wrapping up the loose ends now.
And no matter what he’d said, she was grateful, with all the ferocity of the agony and rage that were the only things fueling her will to live now.
He stood straighter, his eyes taking on a solemn cast. “Now you know. But there’s one thing more I need you to understand. You have nothing to fear anymore, Anastasia. Never again. I pledge it.”
His vow, along with the ramifications of his revelations, sank deep in her mind, drying her tears, stifling her agitation. She stared up at his hard, arresting face, and felt even more confusion and questions swamping her.
Years ago he’d been her lover, the embodiment of all her fantasies, the sum total of everything she could have never dreamed of. Then one day it was over. He’d said he was traveling on business. Then he’d never contacted her again.
The end had been so sudden she would have believed something terrible had happened to him if she hadn’t read about him in media sources that covered the rich and famous. It had forced her to stop her efforts to contact him after one unanswered try. For only one thing could explain his ending it like that. In their incendiary, if short-lived affair, all the passion and emotion had only been on her side.
Yet everything he’d been doing since the attack contradicted that assumption. None of that was the actions of a man who cared nothing for her, or for Alex, whom he’d cut off as well. Everything he’d told her proved he’d kept close tabs on her. He’d come to their rescue without a moment’s hesitation, and he continued to go to unimaginable lengths to eliminate any further danger to her and her family, and to avenge Alex. He’d been unwaveringly there for her through this ordeal, by her side from the moment he’d rescued her.
It was beyond confusing. But she was also beyond attempting to make sense of it all.
She could do nothing but let him steer the situation as he saw fit. He had all the knowledge, and all the power, while she was demolished, fragile in body and psyche.
She nodded weakly, accepting his vow and admitting her need for his protection, then lowered her aching, trembling body back to a supine position.
“I know you don’t want thanks, Ivan, but you have mine. I’d do anything to repay you.” His growl started to interrupt her but she closed her eyes, aborting his exasperation. Before she let exhaustion drag her into nothingness again, she whispered one last thing. “Let me know when you decide it’s safe to contact our families.”
* * *
Ivan watched Anastasia’s breathing even out until it was the imperceptible movements that had at first sent him berserk, thinking it was a sign of deterioration.
But he’d been finding other things to compromise his sanity—her gemlike azure eyes, which had turned muddy, her peaches-and-cream complexion and even her long, thousand-hues golden hair that had become ashen, and her body, which had lost its lush curves and looked more fragile by the day.
But Antonio had kept assuring him she was getting better, and he’d been by her side day and night making sure she continued to do so, watching for every sliver of improvement.
Now the last words she’d said before she’d slipped back into oblivion reverberated in his head.
Our families.
She’d meant her and Alex’s families: their parents, Alex’s wife and children, and his in-laws, who were like a second family to both of them.
She couldn’t know one of those families was his, too.
Keeping that fact a secret, keeping away from that family, had been one of the two reasons he’d forced himself to walk away from her and Alex years ago. Though he’d told her a lot today, that was one revelation he was keeping to himself. As it was, what he’d revealed of the tragedy had hit her hard enough.
But she’d made him tell her. And soon the need to keep their families in the dark would be over and her family’s grief would only add to hers.
Dealing with the scum responsible for Alex’s murder had been the easy part of this disaster. The hard part—and what kept getting harder—was dealing with everything that concerned Anastasia. His dread for her. His inability to give her her life back, with her body intact and her brother alive. And the expectation that he’d soon have to relinquish her again.
But the hardest thing of all was her very nearness.
When he’d deprived himself of it seven years ago, he’d thought he’d eventually become numb to the loss. It had taken one look into her eyes, in those nightmarish moments when he’d thought he’d been too late to save her, to prove how wrong he had been.
He hadn’t been numb; he’d been shut down completely. It had been the only way to continue functioning. The injury of her loss, what he’d inflicted on himself, agonized and hardened him like none of the ordeals of his hellish past had. And that had been when she’d been alive and well. In the time he’d thought she might die, too, he’d known he wouldn’t survive losing her for real.
But he hadn’t lost her. Antonio had saved her.
At first he’d hidden Alex’s fate from her, and the details of what he’d
