His bitter self-recrimination caught her off guard, making her want to touch him again, but she was learning. He would talk a little, but only if they kept it to the facts.
“Cancer?” she guessed, unable to help being affected by his loss. He gave an abbreviated nod and she murmured, “That’s tragic.”
“It was suicide,” he bit out. “She knew something was wrong and didn’t seek treatment. I would have done anything—” His jaw bit into the word. “But she felt like a burden on me.” His hand opened, empty and draped with futility before he shoved it into his pocket. “And she wanted to be with my father.”
Clair caught a sharp breath, frozen with the need to offer him comfort, but very aware she couldn’t reveal too much empathy right now.
“She must have loved him very much,” she murmured, voice involuntarily husky.
“She was shattered by his death. Broken.” His gaze fixed on a sculpture that had fallen over and splintered into a million pieces, its original form impossible to discern. “I hated seeing her like that. Hated knowing I—” He cut himself off and shuddered, looking around as though he’d just come back into himself. “Are you finished here?”
Clair huddled in the constricting layer of her jacket, aching for Aleksy even as she silently willed him to finish what he’d started to say, sensing he needed to exorcise a particularly cruel demon. Yes, she needed to keep from becoming too connected to him, but she couldn’t ignore his terrible pain.
Carefully stowing her camera in her pocket, she put her hand on his arm. He stiffened against her touch, rejecting her attempt to get through to him.
“I’m sure you did what you could. Don’t blame yourself for something you couldn’t control,” she said.
“Who else is there to blame?” he countered roughly, utter desolation in the gaze that struck hers like a mallet before he yanked it away.
A name popped into her head and she spoke it impulsively. “Victor?”
“Chto?” The word came out in a puff of condensed breath as he swung his head to glare at her.
“Did Victor—” It sounded stupid as she thought it through, but she’d been keeping up with the headlines in London. Victor’s perfidies were being revealed with glee by the press. Victims were pouring out of the woodwork day by day. Aleksy’s hatred of the man was bone deep. His remark from last night, “after my father was killed,” still rang in her brain. Perhaps she was being melodramatic, but…?
“Did Victor have anything to do with how you lost your father?” she asked, tensing with dread as she tested this very dangerous ground.
A spasm of anguished emotions worked across his dark expression. There was grief and the reflexive hostility anyone showed when their deepest pain was exposed, but there were other things too. Frustration. Resolve. Remorse?
“It’s not a connection I can prove,” he said through lips that barely moved.
Her whole body felt plunged into an ice bath. To hear her vague suspicion met with such a condemning remark gave her goose bumps. He believed Victor had played a part in his father’s death. No wonder he held her in such contempt for accepting generosity from a man with no right to the wealth he’d used to dazzle and persuade her. She felt sick for letting the advantages Victor offered outweigh a proper examination of the type of man he was.
Clair barely recalled the walk back, lost in absorbing the gravity of the injury Victor had dealt to Aleksy’s family. No wonder Aleksy was such a hard, bitter man. The greater wonder was that he hadn’t swept her onto the street the way he’d threatened to.