Page 103 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

“I wanted to!” I say, realizing that I’m actually yelling back. I never yell. “But Charity convinced me—”

“Are you that fucking simple-minded that you can so easily allow other people to manipulate and influence you?”

A sound escapes my mouth. I’m not even sure what it is. A gasp? A sob? Both? Neither? Whatever it is, I find myself staring hard at him, trying to reconcile the dark-eyed protector who gave me my son with the cruel monster in front of me now.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I finally force out.

The only reason I’m so defensive is because he’s cut to the crux of who I am in minutes. He’s discovered my fatal flaw. My weakness. He’s exposed me in seconds.

And that’s forcing me to confront the reality of who I am—or at the very least, who I once was—against the person I’ve been trying so hard to become.

“No,” he rasps. “I don’t.”

His face may as well be cut from stone. He looks fucking terrifying. And so beautiful.

He takes a step toward me, his square twitching with aggravation. “For all I know, you could be a spy.”

He spits the last word at me. It pierces into my chest like a dagger. My vision blurs behind a veil of tears. I spin away because, more than anything, I don’t want him to see me cry.

Let him try to tell me to stop again. I won’t. Not even for him.

But I can’t see straight. I can’t even walk straight. I’m so weighed down by hurt that it makes me unsteady on my feet.

And, when I twist around, my foot catches a wet spot near the pool’s edge.

I lose my balance. There’s a split second of shock, that grappling fear of losing your bearings and falling backwards without anything to hold onto.

Then I fall. As I tumble into the water, my peripheral vision catches his profile. Dark and stoic. Completely unreachable. Like an ancient statue carved from the hardest, coldest marble known to man.

When my body breaks the surface of the pool, all I can register is panic.

On the surface, water looks so beautiful. You expect it to hold you, catch you, float you. But the opposite is true. It swallows you and drags you down into its depths.

Or maybe both things happen at once and I’m just too messed up in the head to make sense of anything. Because when I hit the water, it hurts.

And when I go under, it forces its way into my body, gushing in uninvited. My nose, my eyes, my mouth all fill up with chlorinated water. Choking the air from my lungs, unrelenting and unforgiving. All-consuming.

The only thing I can think is:Will he save me?

Then, hot on the heels of that thought:Maybe I don’t deserve to be saved.

22

Phoenix

My head is swimming with paranoia.

First, Vitya shows up out of nowhere to warn me of snakes in the grass.

Then, Murray reacts strangely to my question about spies in my home.

It was nothing more than a stutter. But it stuck in my head like a splinter.

When I take stock of all the people in my home, the only two that I can’t vouch for are the two women who’d manipulated me into bringing them here. And yet, when I look at Elyssa, the word “spy” doesn’t match up with the doe-eyed innocence or the subtle naivete that she tries so hard to overcome.

But perhaps that’s exactly why she was recruited. No one would suspect someone like Elyssa. And isn’t that the mark of a perfect mole?

“For all I know, you could be a spy.”

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