I’d done everything I could think to do to give her a home. Gabe, Kevin, and Myles had followed my lead along with Eva, Max, Tatiana, Brooks, Emmy, Thad, Anaya, and Kyle, all doing their part to make her feel safe. Give her something to hold onto—friendship, trust, compassion. Each and every one of them had reached out to her.
I don’t have a home.
That was what she’d said.
“Nat, this is your home. You’re not going back to your uncle.”
“Sarah,” she angrily corrected and tagged an envelope from beside her foot before she unfolded and surged to her feet. “My name’s Sarah. There’s no point in pretending anymore.”
“What are we pretending exactly?”
“That I’m not a Pollaski.”
I felt something unpleasant start to coil in my chest.
“What’s that mean?”
“You know what it means,” she spat.
“No, babe, I don’t.”
“I’m filth.”
Like a dart, her words pierced my heart, making that unpleasantness turn nasty. She believed that, believed she was filth, believed she’d been pretending to be someone else when she wasn’t. But she was dead wrong. She couldn’t hide the goodness inside her, even in the beginning when she’d refused to talk about herself, what had happened to her, and how she’d ended up on a tarmac in Alaska awaiting transport to Canada where she’d be delivered to a man who’d bought her. She couldn’t hide her kindness.
Nat hadn’t been concerned about her situation. All her anxiety had been for Eva and her sons Eli and Liam. Natasha asked about them every day—how the boys were doing after their mother had been kidnapped, how Eva was coping. She’d even asked about Max.
Sarah Pollaski—or Natasha No-Last-Name-Given—cared, and she couldn’t hide it.
It spilled out of her.
“Babe, you’re not.”
Nat winced and I was reminded there were times it hurt to look at her because another thing she couldn’t hide was her pain. There were times when she smiled and it looked almost genuine but it wasn’t. All she’d done was momentarily staunch the flow of anguish. And like any wound that was left untreated, the gash would continue to bleed.
“It doesn’t matter. I have to go back.”
“You don’t and you’re not.”
With narrowed eyes, she took a wooden step toward me, and the ever-present ache to pull her close started to uncurl until my fingertips tingled with it.
This was my plight.
Need and sensibility.
The longer I was around her the harder it was to remember. The harder it was to hold on to my restraint. My need now outweighed my sensibility, turning my dilemma into a battle of self-control.
“You don’t get it,” she huffed and ran her fingers through her long sandy-blonde hair. Her movements were jerky and agitated. “I lied.”
“Lied?”
“To Amie. I knew. I knew everything. I knew what my dad was doing. I knew Amie’s parents worked for my dad. I knew what they did for him. She was right. I lived in that house and I saw it all. I lied and said I didn’t know, but I knew. I just kept my mouth shut because I’m filth like the rest of them.”
I didn’t want to think about the day the rogue CIA agent bypassed my security, broke into my home, and took Natasha. By the time we’d found her, Amie, better known as Ashaki Maloof, had beaten the absolute fuck out of Nat and was readying to kill her. That day still played out in my nightmares. I hadn’t forgotten a single second of it, and the vivid way I remembered told me I would until the day I died.
“That bitch—”
“Was right about everything,” she cut me off. “You don’t know.”
“Five months ago—hell, two months ago—I would’ve agreed with you. I didn’t know jackshit. But now, I do know. I know about your dad. I know about your uncle. I know your dad and uncle started their racket when they were in their teens and built from there. Small-time burglary to start, worked their way up to bigger jobs. Shit was different in the seventies when they started. Easier to fence what they stole. Stay under the radar, especially in Chicago. The murder rate had hit an all-time high, and Barny and Wilco used that to their advantage. Once they had the funds, they started in the business of high-risk loans. In other words, high-interest returns. That venture earned them the money they needed to buy muscle and get into the drug trade. They played it smart, stayed on the fringe, and didn’t make their play for territory until they’d built an army. Once they had the men, the guns, and the cops in their pocket they went for it and won a few blocks. It took them years but they gained more and more ground doing that bloody and ruthless. In the nineties, they added a stable of women and raked it in. Drugs. Women. Gambling. Loans. That’s how the Pollaskis made their money. How your uncle still makes his money.”
“How do you know all of that?” she asked, her face pale.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“You shouldn’t know that,” Nat whispered and dropped her gaze. “You can’t know that.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because…because…he’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, babe. I know he is. So what I don’t get is why the hell you’d think I’d let you go back to him.”
“Let me?” Color rushed to her cheeks and fire sparked in her eyes—a flicker of anger I’d never seen come from her. Something that pleased me a great deal. “I didn’t know I was being held captive,” she finished.
“That’s how you’re gonna play this?” I shot back. “Months, Nat, you’ve been here and when have I ever treated you like you were my captive? Or better yet, when haven’t I treated you less than someone I cared about? I’ve done the best I could keeping you safe even though I was in the dark and had no clue what I was protecting you from. We all have.”
“You can’t protect me from him.”
“Wanna bet?”
“No. Me winning that bet means someone’s dead.”
She was perfectly serious.
Something else she believed, something I needed to correct.
“Wilco isn’t some supervillain, Nat. He cannot hurt you. Now that we know who we’re up against, we can make you safe. Trust us to do that,” I pleaded.
The pink in her cheeks slowly receded and her teeth sank into her bottom lip. And not for the first time I wished I could pull her into my arms and comfort her, lick the sting away, kiss her abused lips, take her worry, and make her forget. Even if it was for a couple of hours. If there was ever a woman who needed to get out of her head it was Natasha. And I knew the perfect way to make that happen. Neither of us would be thinking about anything other than the pleasure I could deliver.
But that wasn’t going to happen for a variety of reasons. The biggest was when all of this was over and she was free and clear of the Pollaski crime family, she deserved a happily ever after. Something I knew better than to believe in. I’d blown my chance and had no interest in finding a future ex-wife. Sure, in the beginning, it would be good, it always was, then the veil would lift and all of the politeness would slide away and it would go to shit, ending in ex-wife number two.