She was perfect.
I need to go home.
The balcony door slid open. Alexei stepped outside, a plate of pizza in his hand that he pressed into mine as he dropped down beside me.
“Do we have to pretend to be lovers out here too?”
Alexei chuckled. “To anyone watching from the buildings across the road, I brought you dinner and a shy soldier to fuck. What is more romantic than that?”
“Pretty much anything, considering the soldier was Decoy.”
“He is an attractive man.”
“He’sDecoy.”
“Hmm. I think the problem is more that he is not Mateo.”
I ate the pizza, ignoring Alexei’s amusement. How I felt about Mateo was hardly a secret. Except, maybe it was. I’d never toldhimI loved him, let alone anyone else. “I miss him.”
Alexei blew out a soft sigh. “I know. I brought you here to protect you, so he would not have to worry that Esteban would come for you, but I see now that keeping you apart is worse than death for you both.”
“Feels like it.”
“For him too. Chaplain, may I ask you something?”
I shovelled the last of the pizza down, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Should I be unnerved that you’re being so polite about it?”
“That is entirely up to you.” Alexei took my empty plate and set it aside, turning back to face me. Aside from the moments he’d saved my life and the freaky fake hook-up scene in the corridor, it was the closest we’d ever been, and I wasn’t unnerved at all.
Until he spoke again.
“A lot of things I thought about Mateo now make sense. I did not see this coming, but it was easy to make peace with, for me, at least. Now, the more I think about it, it is you that confounds me.”
“In what way?”
“You are a murderer, chaplain.”
“So are you.”
“Are we the same?”
I stretched my legs out in front of me. “Is that what confounds you? That you don’t know the answer to that?”
Alexei hummed. “Yes. I want to know why you killed that man when you were so young.”
“Why?”
“Because I think I already know, and I would like to be wrong.”
He didn’t know. He couldn’t. I’d never told anyone except Mateo, and he’d take my demons to the grave. But when I looked at Alexei again, I saw an affinity that curdled my blood.
“I was a sex slave, but I educated myself when I became something else.”
I remembered Cam’s sharp intake of breath when Alexei had uttered those words as if they were nothing. A breath he’d seemed to hold on to for the rest of that horrible night—the night I’d kissed Mateo, then punched him in the face in every possible sense.
Fuck. I grit my teeth, regret and heartache swallowing me whole. “Who was the first person you ever killed?”
Alexei smiled a hideous smile. “A man who did terrible things to me.”