Scandalously Expecting His Child(51)

                Being unable to reach into the past to make her realize that he would have forgiven her anything, that there’d been nothing to forgive, corroded his sanity. Her false belief had deprived him of the chance to protect her, save her.

                He couldn’t even avenge her. Medvedev was already dead.

                But, no. He’d been working to bring down The Organization—for himself, his brothers and all the unknown children who had been abused. But now, more than ever, he would destroy it on her behalf. His vengeance would now know no bounds. He would wreak unimaginable pain on everyone who’d had a hand in a single moment of her suffering. And when she hadn’t told him the worst parts yet... Though he no longer knew if he could withstand hearing them.

                But he would, no matter what it did to him. He had to relieve her of all of her burdens, in every way he could.

                A distant look came into her eyes. “But all my precautions were in vain. When you called me that last time, the moment I heard your voice I knew you’d found me out. I knew it was the end and I wasn’t ready. I would have never been ready. Everything I feared came to pass. You sounded as I always dreaded—angry and disillusioned and disgusted. I was only grateful I didn’t see all that on your face. And there was only one thing I could do. Make it all worse.”

                She looked into his eyes with everything she was on display for the first time. And it was beyond his imagining.

                “I wanted to disappear,” she said. “Make it impossible for Medvedev to find me. I also wanted to help others in my same situation, but I knew our collective freedoms would cost a huge amount of money. So I blackmailed you for it. That also served to end everything between us on the worst note possible.

                “But before I could leave the country, Medvedev walked into the hotel room where I was under a false name. He was shrewd enough to sense I’d make a run for it. I told him I just wanted to escape The Organization, that I thought he wouldn’t come through for me since I only had proof you weren’t his agent. But he was convinced I had proof you were, even deducted I’d blackmailed you myself, though he assigned me purely mercenary motives for that. He said once I gave him the info, he wouldn’t only extort you himself, but your partners, too, whom he was certain were the other operatives who escaped, making this more lucrative than he’d ever thought.”

                She paused to draw in a shuddering breath. “I failed to divert him, and he just knew everything. I knew he’d turn your hard-won freedom into a new prison, would end up turning you over to The Organization to redeem himself. The one card I had left was that he needed solid info, and I wouldn’t give it to him. At first, he still promised he’d keep his end of the bargain if I did mine. But I refused, told him he couldn’t do a thing without proof. And he started torturing me.”

                Something fundamental charred inside him. Red-hot wrath against a dead man he couldn’t kill again almost ate through his arteries.

                “I knew I wouldn’t walk out of that room alive, but I could still save you if I took him down with me. With the last strength left in me, I stabbed him with a stiletto I used as a hair clip. I know how to kill a man with one strike, but he was no ordinary man. Instead of going into instant shock, he was all over me. He almost killed me...before he succumbed.”

                His whole body started shaking, on the verge of exploding. Scarlett had fought a monster like Medvedev and sustained near-fatal injuries...for him.

                “I managed to stem my bleeding, to leave the hotel without being seen, to barely reach a secret medical center before I collapsed. It took them days to stabilize me.”

                She stopped, and her silence stretched. His blood burned and congealed in his arteries each single second.