“My parents were murdered by a man who felt very threatened by their political views. His name was Sorbacov and he was a very powerful man in Russia. At the time, he backed a certain candidate for the presidency, and he got rid of any opponent to his choice. When he killed the parents of his political enemies, he took their children to one of four schools to train them to become assets for his country. That was really code for assets for him. He oversaw the schools and directed his agents—us—where he wanted them to go,to those he wanted them to kill.”
Ice kept his gaze fixed on her face. Her chair was angled toward him and her eyes had jumped to his. He saw trepidation there, but mostly compassion. Soleil was all about that emotion. She had gone very still.
Shit. He’d been such an idiot not sharing anything about his life with her. If he gave her anything, it was done so casually, as if the tidbit meant nothing. This meant something to her. He reached for her hand and immediately brought her palm to his thigh, his thumb sliding back and forth across her knuckles. He needed that connection to her.
“Alena was a baby, an infant really. Storm and I were toddlers. Unfortunately, we were striking, all three of us. Our unusual eyes and hair made us prime targets for the pedophiles running the school Sorbacov sent us to. He liked little boys. More, he liked to see little girls hurt. The school was the perfect playground for him, and with our looks, he wasn’t going to give us up.”
She was beginning to register what he was saying, the vile truth of his past. Her breath caught, and her expression was one of horror. He kept doggedly on.
“They ran the school as if we were being taught to be assets, but they didn’t expect us to live, so we weren’t taught much about society outside the walls of the schools. The first thing they did was take our clothes.”
He leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes and tried not to let that little, terrified boy out. There were so many things to be terrified over, but losing her was the worst. He kept rubbing his thumb gently over her knuckles, needing the contact.
“I want to tell you about my past, Soleil, because I want to spend my life with you. If you want that as well, you have to know me. You have to know who I am and what shaped me into being this person.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want to lose you, Soleil. It’s taking a big chance giving this to you. The things I had to do to survive and to make certain Storm and especially Alena did will turn your stomach. They also shaped me into a pretty fucked-up mess of a human being.”
Soleil moistened her lips and then nodded. “I married you, Ice, without knowing you, but I made a commitment to you when I knew exactly what I was doing. Did today shake me up? Yes. I had several things to think about. One, I put you in jeopardy. But two, how easily killing came to all three of you. I never thought of you like that. Savage, maybe, but Absinthe or you, not at all.”
He understood. He hid the killer. Taking a life was instinctive in him. A survival trait. “We were ‘pretty’ and favorites of the instructors. They would rape us, pass us around. Beat us. Throw us back into the dungeon, broken, bloody and traumatized. Little Alena. She was just a baby. We couldn’t stop them.” He shook his head and looked away from her, not wanting her to see the rage that sometimes consumed him. “Czar was only a kid as well, but older by a few years, and everyone looked to him to find us a way out.” He shook his head, trying not to allow the bile to rise.
He couldn’t look at her now. He could only stare into the flames dancing in the fireplace. “There was no way out. They began to teach us how to have control. They did that by arousing us while we were being beaten. We were supposed to force our bodies to cooperate no matter how much it hurt. Sometimes it was the opposite, we weren’t supposed to react when someone was arousing us. That training continued for years, day in and day out. Depending on who the instructors were and what type of sex they got off on, we were used and taught to be proficient at their games until those games were normal to us.”
Her hand went to her throat in that defensive way she had. When he glanced at her, her eyes were wide with shock.