Smoke Signals (29 page)

I got up, shrugging off his hands. “Tired, too. I’m going to bed.”

“We need to talk.”

“Not now. Later. Tomorrow.” Too much had happened already. Mental and emotional exhaustion had completely taken over my life lately, and today had pushed me to the brink of what I could handle.

“Mom’s right,” he said when I was halfway down the hall.

I stopped. Turned slightly, mainly just my head, until I could see him. He’d gotten up and started to follow me. Right about what? She’d said a lot of things, none of which I’d been in any mood to hear. I shook my head in confusion.

“She’s right that I love you.”

Razor didn’t love me.

I shook my head, unable to allow myself to believe his words.

Because if he loved me, it would only magnify the pain when I was eventually sent away. My own heart breaking was something I could find a way to handle. I’d experienced that more than enough to get through it again. At first, it would be overpowering. Debilitating. All consuming. But with time, the sharp, piercing ache would dull to a steady throb. It wouldn’t ever truly go away, but I could learn to live with it. It would simply become part of me, like the calluses on my feet from my dancing in toe shoes.

But the thought that he would hurt just as deeply… That was too much.

“I do love you,” he said, and the first of my tears fell.

He closed some of the distance between us, but I backed away. I was too fragile. One touch would be all it took to shatter me. I’d burst into billions of pieces the size of a speck of sand.

“Tori,” he said. Just my name. Pleading.

A vise inside my chest squeezed out all my air. “Don’t.” It was all I could get out, a harsh, jagged, broken word, but it was everything.
Don’t come closer. Don’t touch me, because I’ll only love you more. Don’t let yourself love me. Don’t believe in fairy tales, because they’ll never come true. Don’t let them send me away.

But he didn’t listen to me.

In three determined strides, he was there. In front of me. Touching me.

He cradled my face between both his hands, tipping it up so our lips met. Soft. Tender. Reverent. He kissed me in a way no man ever had before. Like I was worth the effort of holding himself back, taking his time. Like I ought to be handled with care.

Despite myself, I grabbed hold of his shirt and tugged him closer to me, holding on as though my life depended on it. At the moment, that assessment might not be too far from the truth.

All too soon, he broke off the kiss and backed up a step, still caressing my cheeks.

“Why don’t you want me to love you?”

I tried to shake my head, but he kept a firm hold on me.

“Tell me, Tori. Talk to me. Baby, I need to understand.” The blue of his eyes had turned almost black as he searched me for answers.

“Please don’t,” I said through my tears.

“You’ve got to give me a fighting chance. Let me in on whatever it is that’s going on in your head so I can find a way to combat it.”

There was nothing he could do to change the inevitable, though. I wasn’t sure talking about it would help anything. It would only force me to face everything I was scared of head on. Even though I knew he’d follow, I wiggled out of his grasp and headed into his bedroom.

He closed the door behind us as soon as he came through. He took a few strides toward me, dragging a hand through his hair, but then he stopped. His eyes were wild and full of hurt when they landed on me.

But there would be much more hurt soon if he let himself love me. It had to end.

“You keep walking away. Shutting me out. Closing down.” He sounded like a wounded animal, and he had a wild look in his eyes like he’d been cornered on top of being hurt.

This couldn’t be good.

I sat on the edge of the bed and folded my hands in my lap, buying a moment to think before speaking. It didn’t do me any good. I still didn’t know what to say and what
not
to say. If I didn’t figure it out fast, he was going to… Well, I didn’t know what he’d do. Snap, most likely. Whatever that would mean.

He sat next to me, and I fought the urge to put some more distance between us. But he didn’t touch me, so I managed to stay still, almost touching him but not quite.

“You shouldn’t love me,” I forced out. More tears fell, darkening my blouse where they hit. I watched the spots spread.

“Why not? And how the hell do you think I should go about stopping it from happening, anyway? We can’t control who we love. It just happens.”

“It’s not love,” I insisted. “You’re good man—”

“I swear, Tori, if you tell me one more time what a good man I am—” He slammed himself back against the mattress, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “This isn’t me being noble or some shit like that. I’m not confusing the fact that I want to help you with being in love with you. I’m a fucking grown-ass man. I know the difference. I love you.”

“You should try to stop.”

“Why? You said you aren’t running away.”

“Not running.”

“Earlier, at the airport… You said something about how we’d have to still be married in a few years, even after this immigration interview.”

I sniffled, every bone in my body aching to either throw myself in his arms or run to the corner and curl up in a ball. I didn’t do either. I stayed where I was, even though his thigh bumped against mine. “Yes.”

“So you don’t want to still be my wife in a few years? You don’t love me, not even enough to stay when it will give you what you need?”

“That’s not it.” Not at all.

“Then what? I’m trying, Tori. I’m trying really hard to understand, but that’s the only thing that’s making any sense.”

“Because they’ll send me away!”

He went silent. Razor was never silent. He was always talking or laughing. His deep, big voice always filled the room and my heart, but now there was nothing.

I felt empty without the sound of his voice filtering through me. Empty and alone, and even more terrified than I’d been the night I first sought him out. I pressed my eyes closed, trying to come to terms with the newest hole in my heart, because there was more of this to come. So much more. I was going to have to learn to breathe again without him filling me up.

Swallowing hard, I stood. I needed space. But he reached for my hand and stopped me.

“I’m not going to let them send you away,” he said, so quietly I thought I’d imagined it at first.

“You can’t stop them. They’ll make me go back—”

“No one’s sending you back to Russia,” he said with a lot more heat this time. “It’s not going to happen. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Help me, then. Explain it.” With gentle but insistent pressure, he tugged me back down next to him.

“It always happens.” Sobs clogged my throat, threatening to halt my words before they formed, but I somehow powered through. “If I l— If I care about someone, they get taken from me. This time, they’ll take me from you. Send me back to Russia. And then…” I shook my head. “It’s easier to go now. Before.”

“Before what?” He put an arm around me, drawing my head down to his shoulder.

“Before I love you more. It already hurts too much. I can’t—”

“Nobody’s taking you away from me. You got that?” He squeezed me tighter. “If you choose to leave on your own, that’s one thing. But I’m not going to just roll over and let them deport you. If they give us problems, we’ll appeal. We’ll tie it up in the courts for as long as it takes. And if we somehow lose that, then we’ll put in an application for refugee status—”

“Can’t be a refugee,” I cut in. Not the way I understood it, at least.

“If you can’t be a refugee after what the fucking Mafia has done to your family, then this country’s refugee laws are seriously fucked up. There’s got to be some kind of visa for trafficking victims. Something.”

“There’s visa, yes. But you have to help the police. You have to give them information. Help them track down Mafia guys. I— I can’t. I don’t have information to give.” I’d looked into it after Papa died. Even if I qualified in other ways, I didn’t have any information to give them. I couldn’t help them end human trafficking. There was no chance I’d be granted that sort of visa, the same as they wouldn’t consider me a refugee because I wasn’t being persecuted for my race or religion, or anything like that.

Razor scowled. “It isn’t going to matter, because it’s never going to get that far. Because even if we didn’t know each other and didn’t love each other when we
got
married, we do now. So we’re going to go to that goddamned immigration interview, and they’re going to see that this is a real fucking marriage, whether it started out that way or not, and that’s going to be the end of it. We might have to prove we’re still happily married in a few years, but it’s not going to be a big deal. No one’s taking you away from me.”

I wanted to believe Razor. He spoke like he believed what he was saying, and there was no doubt he was full of conviction as far as making sure I wouldn’t be deported. But things were never that easy, at least not in my life.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said, tipping my chin up toward him. “Still processing?”

I nodded. Thoughts were swirling through my head, making me feel like I was in a never-ending pirouette. Dizzy didn’t scratch the surface of how I felt.

Razor kissed my forehead and hugged me tighter. “Let’s get some sleep.”

We changed clothes and crawled under the covers. There wasn’t a chance I’d fall asleep any time soon with the way my thoughts were all jumbled. I rolled onto my side, facing away from him, and curled up around my pillow.

“Tori? I really do love you. I need you to believe that.” He smoothed a hand down my arm, and I shivered.

“Try to stop,” I said, my voice cracking. “Please. Try not to love me.”

“Not possible.”

Another tear tracked down my cheek and wet my pillow as he slid into the space behind me. He wrapped an arm around my waist and tucked his knees into the bend of mine, fitting with me like spoons in a drawer.

“I’m scared,” I whispered into the dark. “I don’t want you to hurt when I’m gone. Can’t stand it.”

His lips pressed to the back of my head. “Of all the things for you to worry about… You’re killing me here. Let me worry about my own heart, beautiful. And maybe let me worry about yours for a while, too. Think you could do that?”

It was a nice thought, but… “No.”

He chuckled. “Didn’t think so. I had to try, anyway. Get some sleep, Tori. Nothing’s going to change for a couple of weeks, at the soonest.”

Which meant I had a couple of weeks to make up my mind as to what was best. For me and for Razor. Even if he wouldn’t agree.

CONSIDERING THE FACT
that this season, we likely wouldn’t do much better than last season, I was in a hell of a good mood for the Thunderbirds’ home opener. Something about realizing I was in love with Tori and she was in love with me—even if she wasn’t happy about it—must have had something to do with it. Having Mom in town helped, too. No matter what the other contributing factors might be, there was no wiping the grin off my face the whole fucking day.

“Why you so fucking happy?” Slava Zherdev demanded when I walked into the locker room at the BOK Center before the game. Slava was my defensive partner on the top pairing, and he was the surliest son of a bitch I’d ever come across. “Put on fucking game face.”

I took off my suit jacket and loosened my tie, winking at him as I took a seat in the stall next to him. He glowered in response, which only made my smile wider. I loved getting under his skin, and he made it way too easy. Off the ice, the two of us were oil and water. On the ice, we weren’t a hell of a lot better. That was how the whole team was, actually. We were just a bunch of spare parts tossed into the mix, but none of us really fitting the roles we were being asked to fill.

Well, that wasn’t entirely fair. Hunter was a true top-tier goaltender, and Drew could play right wing on any team’s top line. The rest of us were a hodgepodge, though. Almost every guy on this team was being asked to play above his level, and the results were disastrous.