Silence stretched between them. He didn’t speak again. He knew she had killed on behalf of her family. She’d taken her revenge, or what she may have considered justice for her sister, yet she just stared at him with her vivid green eyes. There was no judgment in them, no shock, just a strange kind of disbelief.
Scarlet eventually shook her head, frowning. “Absinthe. You were just little kids. Children. All of you, right?”
He nodded. “I was barely five years old the first time I went with them. It was scary, but we all did our part. It was the only way. We knew they were going to kill us. So many were already dead. Not everyone could know. They would tell. Sorbacov would bribe some of the kids with good food and candy, pretend he would let them out or tell them he would let their younger sisters or brothers go home. He wouldn’t, but he’d lie, and you’d want it so desperately that some believed him.”
“You didn’t?”
“Even then, I could hear lies.”
“Who planned these attacks out?”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t me. I have brothers who are brilliant strategists. I can do things, but I wouldn’t have thought of that particular solution, not in time anyway. At least I don’t think so.”
He wasn’t about to incriminate anyone else any further. Even if she told someone a preposterous tale about his fellow club members murdering their pedophile captors, who would believe her? He’d given her enough truth about who he was. Either she was going to give him something of herself back, or she wasn’t.
Scarlet sighed. “I’m not a saint no matter what you might think. There’s a reason Holden wants the Venomous club to bring me to him alive. He has a reason to hate me. I dated his son, Robert Jr., in college. I was very young, only seventeen and in my second year. Emotionally, I may have been even younger, I don’t know. I certainly looked at the world through rose-colored glasses.”
He reached out and took her hand, rubbing it between his to give her courage.
“I don’t know why I have this weird thing about sex, but I just don’t get aroused unless a man is telling me what to do.”
Her gaze jumped to his face. He felt the leap in her pulse. Her heart accelerated. Color rose under her skin.
“I mean I really like it.”
There was more to it, even more than Code had gotten from the testimony from the court trial, but then her idiot college boyfriend probably didn’t really know the first thing about what she’d tried to tell him she needed. She’d been brave to ask him for what she wanted, but the little pissant, privileged Holden Jr., had been too immature to realize he’d been looking at a treasure. Absinthe remained silent when he wanted to reassure her there was nothing wrong with asking for what you wanted in the bedroom.
She bit her lip hard and then looked down at his hand on hers. “We went to this party. It was very crowded and he seemed off, so I was very nervous and uncomfortable. I kept waiting for him to reassure me, but he didn’t.”
She had good instincts, he noted. She would have been fine with the party and the crowded conditions if her man had taken care of her, but he had been too busy thinking about what he was about to do. Absinthe wished the fucker was still alive so he could have his own “talk” with him.
“Robert gave me a drink and kept kissing me, but it didn’t do anything for me. I just couldn’t relax, and I wanted to go home.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Yes. That made him angry. He took me upstairs and told me to get undressed and lay on the bed. He was going to tie me up. I didn’t like the way I felt. I was half-in and half-out of it. I told him that. The next thing I knew his friends had come into the room. I’d made it clear I didn’t want anyone else to touch me. He had other ideas and so did they. At that point I realized he must have given me some kind of drug.”
There was a note in her voice that alerted him to something more, something he didn’t like. Guilt? Shame? The emotions were twisted together, difficult to pull apart and look at. There was something else he couldn’t put his finger on yet. He could “see” the images if he chose, but he wasn’t going to rip them out of her mind.
He stroked her inner wrist over her wild pulse. “Breathe with me, Scarlet.” He kept his voice low, soft, pushing the command gently into the path between them. “You’re safe with me. Just breathe with me.”
He caught glimpses of men’s faces coming at her. A man with a knife, his face ugly that she dared to defy him.