Page 79 of Savage Saint
I blink, and Angelo's face comes back into focus. He's watching me, the anger in his expression now mixed with concern.
"You went somewhere else," he says quietly.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
"Where?"
"My father's office," I whisper. "I used to beg him to let me do jobs for him. To prove myself."
Understanding crosses his face. "And now you want to do the same for me?"
"No." The word comes out stronger than I expected. "For me. I need to do something. Something good with what I am. With what he made me." I take a deep breath. "I need to take this poison inside me and use it to help those girls. Otherwise, what's the point of any of it? What's the point of surviving?"
The shame of my past floods through me, not just the killing, but the wanting. The desperate need to please a man who saw me only as a tool. But now I have a chance to choose. To use the same skills for something that matters.
"I need this," I say quietly. "I need to know that all of it, everything I went through, everything I did, wasn't for nothing."
Angelo steps forward, his eyes no longer the hard, calculating gaze of a killer but something softer, something I've only glimpsed in unguarded moments. His hand comes up to mythroat, not with menace or threat, but with a gentle pressure that grounds me in the present.
"I wouldn't survive losing you," he says, his voice barely a whisper.
We stand suspended between breaths, his lips so close to mine I can feel the warmth of his words against my skin. The world narrows to just him, his hand on my throat, his eyes boring into mine, the slight tremble I feel in his fingers that betrays everything his words cannot.
I swallow hard against his palm, feeling the steady pressure and the way my pulse races beneath his touch. It should scare me, having someone's hand at my throat. It should trigger every defence mechanism I've ever built. But it doesn't. Instead, it feels like an anchor, keeping me from drifting away into the storm of my own making.
"I'm not weak. You said so yourself," I remind him, refusing to back down even as my body yearns to lean into his touch.
His grip tightens slightly, not enough to restrict my breathing but enough to make me focus entirely on him, on this moment.
"No, Butterfly. You're not weak." His voice is rough with emotion, like gravel wrapped in velvet. "You're precious."
The word crashes through me like a bullet, shattering something deep inside. Precious? Me?
I've been many things in my life: a weapon forged in pain and discipline, a soldier following orders without question, a tool to be used and discarded. But precious? Never that.
Yet as the word hangs between us, it triggers something, a fragment of memory so brief I almost miss it. A woman's voice, warm and lilting with a Polish accent far softer than Jerzy's harsh tones.My precious girl. Her face is blurry, but her arms are around me, safe and warm.
And beside her, not Jerzy, but a man who resembles him—same jawline, similar build, but with kinder eyes. He's lookingdown at me with something I've never seen in Jerzy's gaze: pride without cruelty, love without condition.
The memory slips away as quickly as it came, leaving me gasping against Angelo's hand, my eyes wide with shock. Who were they? And if Jerzy isn't the man in my memory, then who is he to me?
26
KASIA
The memory cuts through everything else, leaving me frozen.
A woman's voice, clear and sweet, singing a Polish lullaby:
"Oj lu li lu li, malenka. Oj lu li lu li..."
The sound fills a warm room with soft yellow light. I'm small, so small, curled in soft blankets. Safe. Loved.
Then a voice cuts through the melody, familiar but somehow wrong at the same time. "You look beautiful when you sing to her."
The woman, my mother, stiffens, her arms instinctively pulling me closer. "What do you want?"
"Can't a man visit his family?" The voice is gentle, almost tender, but there's something underneath it. Something that makes my mother's breathing quicken.
