Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 127461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
He rolled his shoulders in a slight shrug. “I was smaller than Fyodor and Timur, so no one ever considered me a threat. Rogue didn’t have the obvious bulk that their leopards did. He was sleek and long but deadly fast. I trained him away from everyone, including Timur and Fyodor.”
Her blue-gray eyes didn’t move from his face. “Why?”
Gorya allowed his gaze to drift over her delicate features. She was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful. She would catch the attention of other men if they looked too closely. How had she gotten away from the shifters who should have been watching for an unattached female?
“I recognized very early that I was different. That Rogue was. Not just my appearance but the way I thought. The way I moved. My speed. The more I trained, the more apart I was from them. I didn’t want my cousins to see me as different. And I was worried that the way I craved violence—the things that went through my head when I planned to take down Patva and his men—made me just like them.”
He had brought his gaze back to her eyes, watching carefully, missing nothing. He interrogated prisoners all the time. He read others easily. Everyone had little subtle tells that gave them away, but not Maya. She continued to observe him with the same expression on her face. He couldn’t detect judgment. He couldn’t detect anything at all.
She had the longest eyelashes and a perfect bow of a mouth. The longer he looked at her face and took in each detail, the more he found himself fixated on it.
“Keep going.”
Maya’s voice penetrated his dazed distraction and he realized for the first time the sound had a mesmerizing quality to it. Captivating. Even compelling. She could catch a man off guard if he wasn’t careful. She had far more weapons at her disposal than guns and knives, maybe much more lethal ones. He was fascinated with her more than ever, and that was dangerous.
“I had already begun hunting Patva’s men. I started first by disrupting his arms deals. He supplied arms all over the world. He’d negotiate deals, take large down payments and then ship the guns after the deals were finalized. I would ruin the guns or dump them. I shifted blame to whoever was in charge, someone he’d always trusted and their crew. When I first started, I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. He never considered me a threat. No one ever did.”
She nodded her head in approval. “Nice. Essentially, you let Patva punish his men. You didn’t have to risk your leopard or yourself at that point by going up against grown men. You just used your brains.” A little frown flitted across her face. “But you did have to sabotage the weapons. That was a big risk.”
“Patva didn’t just punish his men.” It was important to Gorya that Maya understand the extent of what was going on in his childhood lair. “He tortured them. He wanted to break them. He destroyed their families in front of them, not that any of them had families to speak of. Most had murdered their wives already at his command. If they had daughters, they sold them or killed them—again, at Patva’s command. Their sons were just as bad or worse than they were. They would take delight in raping and torturing. They let their leopards hunt humans. Again, even as a child, I didn’t feel the emotions I should have when Patva blamed them and they weren’t responsible. I was elated.”
Again, he waited for condemnation. Again, she surprised him. She nodded. “Those were some of the men Patva gave you and your cousins to when he decided you needed to be punished.”
She was astute. He rubbed his jaw to cover the sudden urge to step into her space and pull her to him. He didn’t like touching others—and he didn’t kiss women. That was too intimate. There couldn’t be intimacy between him and anyone else. Just the thought of it made his skin crawl and his leopard rage—until Maya.
He nodded his head slowly. “I marked every one of them. I never said a word to my cousins. I made certain Rogue would never talk about our plans or our training to the other leopards. I allowed Patva’s punishments, the beatings and rapes, anything he threw at me, without ever fighting back. I let him think me a coward. Fyodor and Timur protected me as best they could. I wasn’t defiant when they were around because I didn’t want to put them in the position of having to defend me. Timur often got in trouble coming to my defense. I had to be careful never to show my speed to him or to Patva’s men.”
“That must have been a pretty narrow tightrope you walked every day.”