Chapter 16
Sixteen
“Why did you sleep beside me?”
Andrei had heard her coming, so he didn’t jump when Sofie spoke from behind him.
Two of the playrooms upstairs had beds. Landon and Colette were using one, and he’d given the other to Sofie. The couches down here in the half-finished lounge were long enough for him to stretch out on, so that’s where he’d been attempting to sleep until he gave up ten minutes ago, opting to stare out the windows at the city lights in the distance. It was past the witching hour, and he’d taken comfort in imaging her upstairs peacefully sleeping.
She took another step, the swish of fabric only a whisper of sound. “Did hearing about what I am make it so you don’t want to do it again?”
At that he turned, heart lurching.
Sofie looked like some long-ago fairy queen with a blanket wrapped around herself like a cloak, her hair loose on her shoulders. Moonlight made her ethereal. A creature of light not native to this dusty mortal coil.
“What do you mean?”
“Before, when I woke up, you were in bed with me.”
Andrei shook his head. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Andrei arched a brow. “Do you think I nap beside everyone I arrest?”
Sofie’s posture softened. “Only the ones you’ve already had sex with.” She made a face. “Almost sex?”
He couldn’t handle talking to her about sex right now. Not when the night had his defenses down, and the reasons he shouldn’t, couldn’t take her into his arms seemed weak and mutable.
If he did touch her, kiss her, he might not stop until he was inside her. Then he’d be the first one to touch her in every way.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It was inappropriate. I’d intended to sit beside you and wait until you woke up to talk, but…” He shrugged.
“If you were awake and watching my house, it means you didn’t sleep at all.”
“Not an excuse,” he said firmly, then relented a little. “But a reason.”
“And now?” She closed the distance between them.
Andrei, coward that he was, turned his back to her, facing the view once more.
He felt her hesitate and closed his eyes, hating himself as he waited to hear the sound of her retreating steps.
Instead, she moved beside him.
“What did you mean?” he said after a moment. “You asked if my knowing ‘what’ you are caused me to not want to do ‘it’ again.”
“Now you know that I am…damaged.”
Andrei sucked in air. “Fuck. Angel, no.”
“I am. It’s not a bad thing. Just a fact. My life is not normal. You’re right, I was trafficked for labor.”
“You knew?” he asked gentle. “I mean, you’d heard the term human trafficking?”
“I knew that what I was doing was in some ways forced labor.”
“In all ways. You were deliberately isolated and trained to perform a specific task.”
“But I love what I do.”
“Would you love it more if you were creating your own art? If you could show people, tell people what you created?”
That struck a nerve, he could see it. She started to say something but stopped herself.
Of all the things she’d created, how many bore her signature?
“Colette was right, I’ve made several passports. They’re fun. I have a holographic printer.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Her lips twitched, and the ache in his gut lessened at that small sign of mirth.
“The point is, I could leave,” she repeated. “But if I do…no one will bring me originals to paint.”
“A passport isn’t the only thing you need to leave. Do you have a bank account?”
“Yes. My father’s friends, they pay their fees to him. But people like Colette, they pay me directly. Digital currency mostly.”
“Digital currency isn’t the same as having a bank account and debit card.”
“My father has an account for me. There’s always money in it for things I need.”
“Meaning, your father can see every transaction you make, if it’s an account you both gave access to.”
“I get cash too. Colette once paid me a hundred thousand euros in cash. It came in a briefcase.” Sofie grinned. “It felt like a movie when she gave it to me.”
“And you have that money somewhere you can access it?”
“Yes. And my father doesn’t know about it. I haven’t used much. Mostly I use it to buy?—”
She cut herself off, and even in the moonlight he saw the blush.
Andrei shifted closer to her, almost close enough to brush her arm. “Buy what?”
Sofie raised her chin but didn’t look at him, instead staring resolutely out the window. “Toys.”
The word hit him like a punch to the gut. He’d been trying, desperately, not to think about her in a sexual manner since realizing what was happening with her life. Maybe she was right; he was treating her as if she were damaged.
Yet she was the furthest thing from damaged he’d ever seen. She was pure. Flawless. Innocent.
And if he put his hands on her again, he’d drag her even further into the darkness.
Every part of him wanted to ask her about the toys she owned. Make her describe how she used them on herself.
Instead, he stepped back, running a hand through his hair. “I won’t touch you again,” he vowed.
She didn’t move or react, but her stillness took on a brittle quality. “I know.”
The words quavered with grief.
His heart cracked. “You know why I say that, Angel. And it’s not because I don’t want you.”
“It’s because I’m damaged. A victim too scared to leave.”
“No,” he snapped. “Don’t say that about yourself.”
“I tried to escape out the window, but then tried to run back into the house. I know how stupid that was.”
“It wasn’t stupid. You’ve been conditioned to think the only place you’re safe is your house. For fuck’s sake, he told you it was holy ground, and?—”
Andrei cut himself off. There were a lot of pieces of missing information in Sofie’s story, but the middle of the night wasn’t the time to start looking for answers. Especially because asking those questions might challenge what she knew and believed. Though she’d been matter-of-fact about her father’s crimes, with no defensiveness or justifications, he hadn’t gotten the sense she hated the man who’d turned her into his art slave.
He and Landon had sat down and come up with a list of questions after Sofie had gone to bed. Andrei had then done his actual job and started a real case file, sending off a detail-scarce preliminary report.
Rolf was now officially pissed because he’d never intended Club Alibi to be a safe house, and yet so far, that had been its primary use. First with Colette in London, and now with Sofie here in Amsterdam.
“It’s okay. You were already done with me because I lied, and that was before you realized I’m?—”
“Sofie, stop.”
He couldn’t bear the separation anymore. He hadn’t held her, really held her, since he’d pulled her into the tree.
Andrei swept her into his arms, holding her against his chest. A chest that ached when she melted into him, molding her body to his.
“I swear I’m not broken,” she whispered.
“Perhaps we’re all a little broken, Angel.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me.”
Andrei rested his cheek against her head, content to just hold her for a long moment.
“My mother loved me,” he said, surprising himself with the words. “That’s the part people never believe when they hear the rest.”
Sofie tilted her head, saying nothing.
“She was a prostitute. Not by choice. We lived in a one-room flat in a factory town in Czechia. Her clients all work at the manufacturing plant where they made cars. Every time I see a Skoda I think of her.”
When he’d first pulled her to him, Sofie’s arms had gotten trapped between them. Now, she wiggled them free, wrapping her arms around his waist and squeezing him. It felt good, not just to hold her but to be held in return.
“She’d tell me stories about the places we’d go when we had money. Someday we’d have money. We’d travel. Buy nice things.”
“She sounds like a good mom,” Sofie said.
“She tried. She made sure I was never sexually abused. Refused offers from men who were willing to pay enough to buy one of the Skodas they built to be the first to fuck me.”
Sofie gasped, hugging him tighter.
“But she was less worried about the times the men were annoyed I was there and beat me. Or threw me out while they were with her.
“I ran away. First time, I was nine. Slept in a train yard for three days. I had no plan, no money, but I thought… Thought that if I left, I’d have control over something—anything.”
“Did she look for you?”
“That first time, probably, when I didn’t come back by the second day.”
“Who found you?”
“No one. I always went back. I couldn’t leave her.”
Sofie took a shaky breath.
“So you see, I understand,” he said softly. “Why you tried to leave, and why you tried to go back.”
She nodded against his chest.
“When I was twelve, suddenly we had money. I didn’t understand how or why at first. We moved into a house with lots of bedrooms. I got a room to myself. Then other women started showing up. They’d stay with us. Some spoke Czech. Some spoke Slovak, which we spoke too, because that’s where my mother was from originally.”
“The other women, they were…”
“They were being trafficked. The money was because she was helping force these women who originally came for cleaning jobs, into prostitution.
“She died when I was fifteen. Liver failure from Hepatitis B. A transplant could have saved her, I think. But they never even talked about it. Not for someone like her.”
He took a measured breath, letting himself feel the grief and anger that he knew would never full fade. “I think part of me stayed there, in the hospital room where she died.”
Sofie made a snuffly noise, and the idea that she was crying for him should have been absurd but wasn’t. “What did you do…after?”
“I started working for the same people she had. Organized crime. It was survival. Nothing more. Until I got caught, and the authorities started offering me things in exchange for information. I realized that who I was, the life I’d led, had value. I could do things, go places, no one with a pretty childhood could. First, I was an informant, then, when I was old enough, I joined the state police. They sent me undercover almost immediately.”
“That’s how you ended up with Interpol.”
“There were a few career moves and things along the way, but yes.”
They stayed wrapped in each other's arms for a long time, enjoying the silence and the night.
“Andrei?” she whispered just as he was starting to think about scooping her into his arms and moving them to the couch.
He’d hold her until she fell asleep. Then he’d lay her out on one couch, and he’d take the other. That way, he could be with her, but removed the temptation of touching her.
“Yes?”
She pulled back, looking up at him. Her gaze was frank, her chin raised…but she was blushing.
“May I kiss you?”
Sofie braced herself because she knew what his answer would be: no.
But she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t ask. Especially now that he’d shared his own story. Now that she knew that when he said he understood, he meant it.
He’d said she wasn’t broken, then admitted maybe they were all a little broken, but with him…with him, she felt whole.
With him, she was more the Sofie that craved adventure than the one who was a willing captive within the gilded cage her father had created for her.
Since Colette arrived at her house, she’d been Adventure Sofie, and was terrified to completely lose that person in favor of the Sofie she’d been just a month ago.
She almost had lost her. The feeling that she had to go home because it was the only place that she was safe—despite the evidence that wasn’t true—had nearly overwhelmed her earlier. If she’d gone back into the house in that moment, she wasn’t sure she’d ever have been able to bring herself to leave again.
Andrei had stopped her. Kept her safe from her herself.
He made her bold, daring. It was why she’d been willing to risk body and soul to submit to him.
And of all the people alive on the earth, he was the only one she wanted to kiss.
It would hurt to hear him say no, but the pain was worth it to know that she’d asked. That she was the Sofie who was bold and daring enough to go on adventures.
Becoming that Sofie over the past few weeks was a sign that she was ready. That she could do what was needed.
Though the Adventure Sofie voice in her head went silent as her body started to burn with embarrassment when the silence stretched on.
“There are a thousand reasons kissing you is a bad idea.” Andrei’s low voice wrapped around her like the silky dark of night.
Sofie closed her eyes, bracing herself to hear a list of all the ways she wasn’t enough.
“And I can’t remember any of them right now.”
Sofie took a soft breath, hope blossoming. Slowly she raised her head, meeting his gaze. The moonlight was behind him, casting his features in shadow.
“My angel.” He touched her temple, tracing two fingers along her cheek to her chin.
Gently he tipped her face up. She held her breath, scared that if she moved, she’d break the spell of this moment.
Someday she’d paint it. This moment of waiting for a kiss. She knew now why Klimt had used gold. She’d use silver.
Andrei lowered his head, brushing her lips with his.
It was a fleeting touch, and yet she felt it through every nerve in the body.
He groaned low in his throat, his arm tightened around her, and sealed his lips to hers.
This moment. This is what she would paint. A riot of color to show every emotion that flowed through her—joy, pleasure, nervous excitement, a prickle of worry that she was doing it wrong.
His lips moved—pressing softly, sliding gently. Then he opened his mouth just enough for her to feel the heat of his breath against her before his tongue gently touched her lower lip.
“Open for me, Angel,” he murmured against her mouth.
She parted her lips, feeling foolish for not realizing that’s what he’d been hinting at.
His tongue slipped inside. He traced the inside of her lower lip, then flicked the tip of her tongue. Tentatively she returned the gesture. It was intimate and strange. His mouth both hot and somehow cool. She realized she could taste mint—toothpaste maybe.
How strange and wonderful that by kissing him, she now knew things, even if they were as small and simple as his preference for mint toothpaste.
Andrei pulled back, resting his forehead on hers.
Sofie’s throat tightened, and unexpected tears burned her eyes.
Her first kiss.
And it had been perfect.
Gently, Andrei eased her away from him, then bent to pick up the blanket that had fallen down around her feet.
She wondered if he’d spread it out on the ground, then lay her down on top of it. She wanted that—wanted the heat and weight of his body on hers.
Instead, he tucked the blanket around her once more, and strangely that felt right too, though she was a little disappointed. That kiss deserved to stand alone, the signature moment of this moon-soaked night.
“Goodnight, Sofie.”
Maybe she should have worried the kiss hadn’t been good. Maybe he’d kissed her out of pity, and she should be mortified.
But their gazes met, and what she saw in his eyes mirrored her own emotions.
What she felt as she looked at Andrei’s dark, silent figure was neither worry nor embarrassment, but hope.