Page 51 of Wild Heart
“Don’t be disrespectful. You have no idea what it’s like to be a grieving parent with a mountain of debt. The only thing I’ve ever asked of you is to be there for me.”
I pressed my hands to my face and took a low breath. Beneath the fabric of my clothes, I trembled, and my toes curled like they were readying my feet to run.
“It is astronomically fucked up that you believe that, but maybe it’s my fault because, for a while, I believed you too.”
“I’ve always told you the truth.” He approached me with a placating, cautionary smile. “What has changed in you?”
Ivan.
He’d always made things quiet, and within that silence, I found I didn’t need to be saved… I just needed to be loved.
Wholly and obsessively.
“I told you. I’m tired.”
“How can you possibly walk out of here knowing the burden that might cause? How could you live with yourself?”
Oh.
I hated him.
Curling inward, I wrapped my arms around myself and curled my fingers into the skin covering my waist. There was a cavernous, hollowed-out knot of misery low in my gut, and it all came barreling from my body in one sharp scream.
Like glass, I shattered.
Unseen fractures spiderwebbed across my skin the longer I screamed, and I waited for the moment I’d start to fall.
“Solnyshko.”
He covered my body with his, winding his arms across my back to cradle my upper body. My forehead fell against his chest, and I screamed into the fabric until I couldn’t breathe. I felt his touch on the back of my neck, and he wrapped his fingers around my throat and started rubbing as though he knew how badly it ached.
“This is him, yeah?Truslivyy?”
“That’s him.”
He grunted. “You want me to kick his ass?”
A laugh burst from my chest. It was raspy, and it hurt like hell moving through my throat.
With an arm beneath my butt, Ivan lifted me until our noses touched.
“Wrap your legs around me, brat.”
“But—”
“Marcos.”
The ice in his eyes was cracked wide open, and he stared down at me like he wanted to cover himself in the air I breathed. To pull it into his lungs the second it left mine.
“Your pain hurts worse than any bullet I’ve taken. I could’ve ripped my kidney out myself, and still, it wouldn’t have compared to the burn I feel looking at your tears.”
God.
“I love you.”
“Love you too, baby. Now, did you want to introduce me to your father, or should I just kick his ass?”
Cheek on Ivan’s shoulder, I looked toward my father. A grimace was painted across his pale lips, and he rubbed at his chin, pinching the loosened skin as he took in Ivan’s size.
