Page 69 of Roma Queen
It’sthe middle of the night when he returns. I feel his touch, light and gentle on my skin, his fingers caressing the side of my face, and I slowly open my eyes. He’s crouched down in front of me, leaning against the side of Sarah’s couch, where exhaustion finally claimed me some time ago, and he’s looking down at me like I’m a treasure he just stumbled across entirely by accident.
“Hey you,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. You looked so peaceful. I shouldn’t have woken you.” He runs the tip of his index finger down the bridge of my nose, all the way to the tip, fixated on me, eyes alive with some emotion I can’t quite pinpoint through my sleep-clouded brain.
“Where’s Lazlo?” I groan. “Is he…”Dead? Buried alive? Locked away?I don’t know which option I’d prefer at this point.
Pasha smiles tightly. “Patrin tracked me down. Or I tracked him down. Never mind. We gave Lazlo to your friend, Detective Holmes. I get the feeling Lazlo’s buried so deep in shit right now, he’s never going to see the light of day again. Holmes is coming for Corey any second. Is the kid okay?”
The kid is more than okay. Fed, bathed, and dressed in clothes Archie managed to find somewhere, Corey Petrov issafe. “Yes. He’s excited to go home.”
When I held Corey in my arms for the first time, comforting him, feeling his heart thundering behind his small ribcage, it felt like the hand of fate was resting on my shoulder. This all started with Corey. This whole, wild, rollercoaster ride began with the sound of his small, terrified voice on the other end of the phone. I’d given up all hope that the story would end with him alive and well. I still have no idea who the little boy was that washed up on the banks of the Spokane River, but a selfish, fucked up part of me is so glad that it was a different child and not Corey.
“And Garrett?” Pasha asks. “I should fucking kill him for—”
I stroke my thumb along the line of his cheekbone, shaking my head. “He’s gone, Pasha. We’ll…” I sigh, delving deep, muddling through my own mixed emotions, trying to come up with something to say that might make sense. “We’re never going to understand Garrett. He was Lazlo’s pet for years. Nearly his whole life. God knows what he went through, but I do know for a fact that he suffered because of that man. He should never have taken Sarah. There are plenty of things he shouldn’t have done. But he protected Corey in the end. Saved him. And he didn’t hurt me. He did what was right in the end.”
“I’m sure Sarah doesn’t see it that way.”
“You’d be surprised.” I breathe deep, mulling it over. “Sarah’s the most compassionate person I know. When we got that mask off her…she hugged him, Pasha. I could hear the anger and the pain in her voice, but she told him to forgive himself, because she had. It was…it was really fucked up, actually.”
Pasha blows out his cheeks, surprised. “She sounds like a bit of a bad ass.”
“She is. You have no idea. I can’t wait for you to meet her properly. Better to wait ’til morning, though. She’s gonna need so much sleep to recover from that ordeal.”
“Of course. Archie’s sitting vigil over her anyway. He wouldn’t even let me stick my head in there just now. I get the feeling the sly old bastard might be feeling a little over protective toward her.”
“Do you think she’ll go back to live with the clan now?” I whisper.
Pasha shrugs. “You know her better than I do. But she’s welcome. From here on out, she’ll be welcome to come and go whenever she likes, if that’s what she wants.”
When I breathe out, my muscles feel like they’re melting away from my bones. The tension, the panic, and the worry all seem to subside, and for the first time in weeks I feel at peace. Up untilthismoment, I haven’t given myself permission to believe it. That it’s all over. That we’re safe. That Lazlo no longer poses a threat to us. But seeing the relief in Pasha’s eyes, it finally begins to sink in.
I haven’t cried. Not once, throughout this entire mess, but it seems okay to allow myself a moment of weakness now. A gentle frown pulls at Pasha’s brows, as he carefully reaches out and brushes away a teardrop, catching it in the crook of his curled finger before it falls.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I came barreling into your life and turned it upside down, didn’t I? It’s the last thing I wanted.”
Gently, I take hold of him and slowly turn his hand inward, placing a long, featherlight kiss against the roadmap of faint blue and green veins and the beautifully woven, inked, black tree roots on the inside of his wrist. “You don’t ever need to apologize. That’s not how any of this happened and you know it,” I whisper back. “Lazlo caused all of this. He brought me to Spokane. Spied on me. Sent me to the Midnight Fair. Orchestrated our meeting, knowing you’d be there to find Shelta. He was the catalyst that brought us crashing together. He was hell-bent on screwing with my life, just as much as he was determined to ruin yours. I was some sort of sick obsession to him. You were part of a fifty-year-old vendetta. He threw us together as some sort of perverse experiment, because it was entertaining to him.”
Pasha’s dark eyelashes look like spilled black ink against his pale, high cheekbones. He stares down at my hand, still curled around his bare, tattooed arm, and I realize he isn’t breathing. “You believe that?” he asks. How he masters his deep, rough-edged, impossibly commanding voice into such a fragile whisper is a mystery. “You think this is all because of Lazlo? He coerced you into coming to Spokane, so now you think he had a hand in coercing you to fall into bed with me? Do you think…” He looks up at me, and the cool, penetrating, intense power of his beautiful pale green eyes hits me like a blow to the stomach. “Do you think that what you feel for me isn’t real, Firefly? That this wasallsome kind of manipulation?”
My pulse slows. No one has ever looked at me the way he’s looking at me right now: so proud, so fierce, hopeful and determined. I understand why he’s asking me this question. It has occurred to me that it might be true—that Lazlo managed to bend me to his will, not just me but the both of us, and that the fire and the undeniable draw I felt toward Pasha was merely my body’s response to the dangerous, terrible situation I found myself in, because I needed him. Because I needed someone to lean on, and Pasha was the strongest person I’d ever fucking come across in my whole life.
“Earlier this evening, for a fraction of a second, I’d allowed myself to believe it was true,” I admit. “I waited, expecting to feel relieved, because if this thing between us wasn’t real, then I could go back to my life and dismiss this all out of hand as nothing more than some sort of survival tactic.”
Pasha’s eyes harden. A small muscle flexes in his jaw. I brush my fingers against it, smoothing the tension away. “But the relief never came. The only thing I felt was a harrowing, deep, crushing sense of loss. I already knew it. Despite everything, I’ve always known thiswasreal. Lazlo might have tried to pull our strings, but he didn’t make me fall in love with you, Pasha.You’rethe reason my heart belongs to you.”
He searches my face. It’s the same fierce study he carried out the night he was a hair’s breadth away from crashing into me outside Shelta’s tent at the Midnight Fair, but I don’t feel pinned to the spot, violated by his inspection this time. I study him back, and it comes to me, the reason why he stared at me so fiercely back then, because I feel it, too—a desperate need to capture and catalogue every tiny aspect of his face. To commit every part of him to my memory, the most important, urgent task in the world, because there’s no way he’s real. He can’t be. This contradiction of a man shouldn’t even be possible, like he’s some sort of supernatural anomaly and I’m the luckiest person in the universe to be lying here, permitted to witness his unlikely existence even for a split second in time.
“I wouldn’t have let you go,” he says. “If you decided we weren’t supposed to be…” He shakes his head, changing tack. “I would have fuckingfoughtfor you, Zara. I would have made sure you knew that, for me, this isn’t just real. This is theonlything that’s real. The only thing that matters. Everything else is just white noise.” He slides his hand underneath me, and then he’s lifting me from the couch, placing me on my feet, and he’s kissing me like our very lives depend on it.
The fear, and the hurt, and all of the worry of the past few weeks melts away. The pieces of me that were blown apart by Lazlo’s hatred and sickness all coalesce, united once more, and I’m made whole, not by the satisfaction of aiming a gun at an enemy and pulling the trigger, but by the vital touch of this miraculous man.
When the kiss pauses—because it will continue, there’s no doubt about that—Pasha carefully cups my face in his hands and leans his forehead against mine. “Zara?”
“Yes.”
Our bodies are so close that I feel his heart punching against the wall of his ribcage. “I love you, too,” he whispers.
Epilogue
