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.”
“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.”
