“We could go thin-dipping.”
“What?!”
“Without clothes.”
“Skinny-dipping.” I laughed, but there were tears in my eyes. It sounded so good. And so impossible.
He brushed the tears from my eyes with the back of his hand. “Will you tell me, now?” he asked. “Tell me what happened to you? Do you trust me enough?”
I stared at him. “Is that what you thought? That I didn’t—God, Luka, of course I trust you. I just can’t—” I caught myself and shook my head. “I couldn’t. But now, I think, I can.”
And, gripping his hand for strength, I told him.
When I reached the part about being trapped in the car, he pulled me onto his lap and wrapped his arms around me, surrounding me with his warmth. And even though the memories were so sharp and clear they felt like they could cut me, I didn’t feel in the same danger from them. I had a shield between them and me, now, and he was strong enough to protect me from anything.
Afterwards, as we sat there in the near-darkness, I felt...not healed, but more cemented in the present. As if the past had loosened its grip on me just a little. And it felt as if, the longer I stayed with Luka, the easier it would get.
I could feel the tension in him, the anger at how I’d been hurt and the frustration at not being able to change the past. “What can I do?” he said at last.
“Will you just hold me?” I whispered.
He tightened his grip and nestled my head into his shoulder, and it felt so good that I was asleep in minutes.
The next morning, the cracked ceiling made me frown for a second until I remembered where we were. Then it all came back to me like cold lead dropping from above, pounding me down into the depths.
We’d bought some toiletries from the department store so we could scrape a wash. Breakfast came from a battered vending machine, normally only used by the hotel’s prostitutes between clients. I noticed all the gum was gone.
Luka passed me a scalding cup of instant coffee and offered me the choice of the last two chocolate bars. “That one has raisins,” he said, deciphering the unfamiliar brands for me. “That one is sickly, but I used to like it when I was a child.”
I took the raisin one and we sat on the end of the bed. It was an odd sight, watching a huge, tattooed arms dealer eating a candy bar. I wondered what Olaf was doing, at that moment.#p#分页标题#e#
“Do you think Olaf’s still at your dad’s house?”
Luka nodded bitterly. I imagined Olaf sitting at the huge dining table, tucking into an extravagant breakfast like a conquering king.
“It’s the staff I worry about,” muttered Luka. “I don’t care about the place, but the people….”
“The staff?” I asked.
He looked at me, pain in his eyes. His hands were tightening into fists. “The maids.”
I remembered what Olaf and his gang liked to do to women and my stomach turned over.
“Do you think he’ll move in?” I asked.
He nodded. “My father’s house is nicer than his place. That’s how it works. You take over and you take what you want. Trophies.”
“Like you with the German’s yacht.”
He nodded and then kicked a chair. “He’ll take the jet. Everything. Then he’ll build a fucking empire in the US based on our gun deal. First guns, then drugs. Then, when he owns the local police, his fucking rape clubs. We paved the road for him!”
Guilt knotted in my chest. This was all my fault: I’d sleepwalked into the middle of a war and helped the wrong side to win. I’d been so hot for Luka, I’d not seen the way I was being manipulated. I fell onto the bed on my back and stared at the ceiling. “There’s nothing we can do, is there?”
He shook his head sadly. “What I want to do is kill that bastard.”
For the first time, the idea of killing didn’t disgust me. Maybe that meant I’d finally been corrupted. Olaf Ralavich deserved to die.
“But he’s too well guarded,” said Luka. “And there’s only two of us. We’d have to get him alone.”
“So we just sit here and do nothing?” I asked bitterly.
He turned slightly and looked at me, then down at my legs. Flopping down on my back had made the short hem of my dress ride up. “We don’t have to do nothing,” he growled.
I had to love him for that, for still being his brutish, horny self even when everything was lost. And God knows I’d happily tear his clothes off and make enough noise to piss off the couple next door again, but—
Something was scratching at the back of my mind. Two things he’d said that, in combination....