Free Into My Arms by Lia Riley Page B

don’t know what will happen.
    But one thing is certain. We’re driving foot down on the accelerator, steering right for the edge.

Beth
    I had set the chances of you joining me here at under twenty percent.” He doesn’t turn around when I crunch down the gravel path behind him, wrapped in a thick rose-colored cardigan. Strange how he dresses in such bleak colors, but everything that he hung in the closet for me was bright.
    “Those aren’t great odds.” My voice is strange, hovering somewhere in the no-man’s-land between laughter and tears.
    “But you always manage to surprise me, do you not?” The sun is rising, the dim gray light spreading over the cliffs and sea. Otherwise we are trapped in an alien shadow world. An illusion because I know somewhere not far away is Highway 1. Tourists are driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco or going farther toward the Pacific Northwest. We aren’t alone, and yet, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that we are the only two people remaining on earth.
    A rogue wave slams into the rocks below us, sending spray into the air, and I stand in silence, watching the kelp bob like the hair of drowned mermaids. “Beneath that steely surface is a whole other world,” I say. “Perhaps things live down there that we can only guess at.”
    “We see what we can bear to see,” he answers, turning to face me and extending a mug of coffee. “This is to help cut the chill. I have watched you enough to know your routines. You are never without a coffee at your desk in the morning.”
    “A necessary vice.” I am glad to take the mug, let the warmth seep into my skin.
    He dips his head, a dark lock of hair cutting across his furrowed brow. God, he really is devastatingly handsome, as if chiseled from stone, all hard angles with those even harder granite eyes.
    “What if I had asked to leave?” I say, taking a minuscule step in his direction.
    He gives his sprawling estate a dismissive wave. “I’d have stayed a little longer, preparing myself to face old ghosts…while being haunted by the new.”
    “Me?” I ask quietly.
    “Yes, if you had left, you would have become another memory to keep me awake at night.”
    “Maryska. She haunts you.”
    “Oh yes.” His smile is bitter. “As was her intention, I suppose.”
    “Why would she want to hurt you?”
    He holds up a finger. “To understand her, you need to venture further back. I will not presume to ask that you try to understand my father, because such a twisted brain does not deserve to be probed. I have tried and that has only led me to darkness. My father was a rich man who ascended to great power after the fall of Communism, becoming one of the principal oligarch families in Moscow.”
    “But you are from the Ukraine?”
    “Crimea. Maty , my mother, she traveled to Moscow as a young woman with stars in her eyes and a hunger in her belly for a life better than the one she had known. She traded the one asset she had. Her body. And my father, who was married and had children near her age, took her to be his mistress.
    “But that wasn’t enough for a man such as him. One wife, one mistress. He and other associates formed a network of exclusive brothels around Europe. Expensive. Discreet. Depraved. My mother was eventually tasked with running one in Kiev after I was born and he lost interest in her physical body.”
    “So you were—”
    “Raised in a brothel, yes. But it wasn’t so bad, at least during the day. One of the other women had children.”
    “Maryska.”
    He nods. “Occasionally, my father would come for a visit. You see, he had only girls. I was the bastard, but a son. My cock gave me value. At the time, I didn’t know my father well, so looked forward to his visits. He showered me with expensive gifts. When my mother bragged how I’d developed an aptitude for technology, he kept me updated with the finest equipment money could buy. Eventually it was decreed that it was time for me to leave and go off in