Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(24)

“Okay. But I wish you’d change into your normal clothes. I’ve collected them for you. You would be more comfortable.”

“I’m comfortable now. This is who I am.”

“It’s exactly the opposite of who you are. You would never want this.” He turns away and sets a smaller log on top, concentrating fiercely.

“You don’t know what I want or who I am.”

“You never did take shit from anyone.”

“Stop speaking as though you know me! You knew me once, but you don’t know me now.”

He turns. “You don’t know you, that’s the problem.” He shoves at the logs and then flicks a long match. Some paper catches. The light kisses his cheekbones, causes his short inky hair to glow brown. He shoves in a poker, and the fire roars to life. It’s nice. “You don’t know you,” he says again.

The flames dance, lighting the room. It is all the cozier for the gray day outside. I draw near.

“You used to love fires,” he says.

I sniff. It seems everything I do stokes his hope like the fire warming the room.

“We’d speak in English like this. Always English to practice. We had the best English skills of all our gang.”

That explains some things. “The English I still remember.”

“I bought this place for you. When I saw you on the website, Tanechka, you can’t imagine what it did to me.” The fire burns brightly behind him now, lighting the edges of him. “Everything stopped for me when…you were gone. And then seeing you…I couldn’t believe it. You’d never turn to the camera, of course, but I knew it was you—just like you know me. You can’t fool me. You’re confused, but I think your heart knows me.”

“Viktor,” I say, his name a familiar shape on my lips, my tongue. “I can’t be who you want.”

“You’re always who I want.” He looks around. “I was going to rent some crash pad, but when I saw you, saw we had this chance, I vowed to do this right. Make this beautiful home… Do you recognize any of this furniture? I had this chair sent over from Moscow. That’s where you’re from.” He moves to a gold chair with a carved wood frame. “You remember it?”

The hope in his eyes is so intense, it breaks my heart a little bit. “I do not.”

“We got it at that flea market in Omsk. And the spring inside? I always said to throw it away because the spring made it uncomfortable to sit on, and guests would complain, but you loved this thing. You said, ‘It’s one little piece of wire!’”

Dimples deepen on his cheeks as he smiles at the memory. The dimples do something strange to my belly.

“You said, ‘One little piece of wire won’t get the best of me.’” He looks so happy. Talking about the chair makes him live in that other time.

He kneels in front of the chair, running his hand over part of the cushion, then he looks up at me, face raw with hope. “You can still see the place where you ripped up the cushion so you could get under there. Come. Look.”

I stay where I am.

“You never gave up on anything. You hated quitters. Oh, you really hated quitters.” The smile fades. “Just come and look. You couldn’t get the exact right color of thread.”

I sit on the couch. “Enough.”

He shuts his eyes. It’s what he does when he tries to quell his emotions. I feel frightened to know this, as if I’m being pulled away from my heart’s desire.

“I get it—this is all going too fast for you. You had a trauma. You have amnesia. I’m going to help you, though. It’s okay if you don’t remember everything. Maybe it’s even better to not remember things all at once, but in your heart…”

“I’m not her.”

He comes to me then, sits right next to me. I feel the force of him, the power of him. I feel him on my skin, in my belly. “Do you truly not want to remember?”

“I told you what I want. I want to contact the convent. I want to know what you’re doing for my captive sisters, and if you aren’t planning on freeing them immediately, I want you to set me free so I can go back there myself. Maybe I’ll bring the police and we’ll free them.”

“Right, the police. How will you know which of them you can trust? Do you think a place like that can run without police protection? We have it under control. I was there planting surveillance and getting into their network. It’s being handled.”

I gaze at the fire, hating this helplessness.

“You say you don’t want to know your old life, but how do you know which is the better life if you don’t know anything about one of them?” He takes my hand. My fingers spark at his touch. “You don’t know.”

“I know what I have now is better than any other possible life.”

“The life that you had before, it was glorious.”

“Is that why my body’s covered with the marks of violence? My body is proof that the life I had wasn’t glorious.”

“The life, maybe not always, but you were glorious. You were a warrior. Fierce and so beautiful and brave. You were…” He trails off, searching for words, and there’s that beauty again. My blood races. He’s beautiful when he remembers her. “You shone,” he finally says. “Brighter than anything—”