Beastly Passions (24 page)

“You do.”

“He would assume she belongs to him without volunteering himself to be in her possession as well,” Asha went on. “But you told me not to hide from you because you would not hide from me. You made the declaration of war just to defend my honor. That is not hard. That is not unforgiving. That is good. That is pure. That is a soul.”

“If I have one at all, it is a dark, dark place,” he warned her.

“I don’t believe that’s true. And I’m remorseful for the little boy who wasn’t allowed to be a little boy because his father—who was supposed to be protect him—manipulated him into acts that made him grow up to feel as though he couldn’t be anything aside from calculating and lukewarm.” She lifted a hand as though she planned to touch his face.

Taras felt a growl rolling forth as he caught that hand. “I don’t need pity.”

“I’m remorseful that little boy doesn’t understand the difference between empathy and pity.”

“I am a 
man,” 
he voiced, pacing forward while she backed away. He crowded her against his armoire. “A fully grown man. There is no boy here.”

Not appearing the least bit intimidated, Asha smiled warmly and argued, “Yes, there is. And all he has ever needed was for someone to acknowledge him. However, his mother didn’t when she abandoned him—”

“We will not discuss that.”

“—His father ignored him—”

“Do 
not.”

“—So he hid himself away under a gruff, unfriendly exterior that peels back only when he cannot tolerate being invisible to the outside world anymore.”

“Enough!” he flashed. To his satisfaction she stopped. He leaned forward and whispered again, “
Enough.”

The dead air around them became suffocating and he found himself unable to breathe. But just before he could give into the thought to turn tail and run, there was a knock on his door.

A twitch of his nostrils and he knew who stood on the other side. Moving away from Asha, he closed the distance between himself and the door and opened it a fraction. “Now is not good time, Alexei.”

His friend only glanced from Asha to Taras and back. “I can see this. Hello, Asha.”

She took a step to Taras’ side and bowed her head towards the other male. “Hello, Alexei, how are you?”

He rolled his shoulders. “Today was on a good path. Now? Not so much.”

“And why is that?”

Alexei looked from her and towards Taras.

“Because we have uninvited guest on property who your husband may or may not disembowel for just the thrill of stripping organs from insides.”

Asha blinked owlishly. “Oh…”

Taras bit back a growl. “Who?”

“Your brother-in-law.”

“Karan is here?” Asha hedged. “Why?”

“He will not say, but demands to speak with you because by his account, I cannot understand big words he will spew from asshole that he calls mouth.”

Taras snarled. The entitled little fuck.

“Where?”

“Main office where big, intimidating leather chair is.” Alexei then winked at Asha. “This is one he uses when he is trying to put fear of smiting into the hearts of average men.”

Taras started for the office. “You may not want to waste time, wife. I think you are the only thing standing between sibling and death.”

Gods, what 
had just happened? 
What 
had just happened?

Asha sat motionless, her eyes wide and her lips parted a fraction as she watched her brother, a man twice her size, fall to the floor in a dead sleep, his nose a gruesome bloody mess. Her stare transferred from him, to her husband and back again.

“Do not,” Taras barked to the men suddenly moving as though they intended to come through the doors of his office. “Make me stand up from this chair.”

She drew in a breath. “Taras…”

He lifted a finger and shook his head slowly. “No.
No.
”

“I am not particularly swayed by our relation,” she retorted, blocking out the groaning at her feet as Karan began to come to. “But I also don’t think it was necessary to assault him.”

“He comes here and tells me that your father—
your
father—has been aiding mine in sadistic plot to ruin me, before insulting you and you thought I would do what? Allow it?”
Her husband made an impatient noise. “He should be grateful I did not follow through with true desire to remove tongue and wrap it around throat like noose.” To the men, he said, “Closer steps will cause the loss of your ability to walk. Is this how you would like the night to end? You are in 
my 
home and on 
my 
property so the words that 
I 
speak are of grave importance.”

They halted as though weighing their options and Taras gave her his attention once more. “Did we not have this discussion? Did I not say disrespect was intolerable to me?”

Asha leaned across the desk. “He is a foolish, sheltered boy with absolutely no true understanding of what diplomacy is, however smashing his face in is an extreme reaction when you have not heard all of what he has to say.”

“Believe me, love,” he barked in the most condescending tone. “If I had truly,”—he lifted his hands to make air quotes—“’
smashed his face in’
he would be cold and stiff.”

She bit back blasphemy that she felt she had no right to use considering her religious beliefs. “That does not comfort me in the least bit.”

“You are worried about the trash on the floor?” Taras looked genuinely confused. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps because I used to change that trash’s diapers!”

“And now he behaves as though that was never an occurrence!”

Unable to come up with any logical argument for that, Asha sat back in her seat and rubbed the bridge of her nose. It seemed that “average” and the redundancy of “normal” were going to be blown to absolute shite because she’d briefly forgotten whom she was married to. It was sad seeing as how things had been going so well. But she’d ruined it. Their uninvited
guest
had ruined it.

Like the kept child that he was, Karan had arrived with a group of sycophants that catered to his every move. He had information, he’d said. About Grigoriy and his latest ventures. He’d spoken of their father and how he hadn’t been home in days. When Taras had dismissed that as the Shankur pride’s problem, Karan had made an error in judgment that had cost him dearly in stature when he’d chosen to allow his gaze to trail over to Asha, murmuring,
“I smell him all over you, sister. Is he no longer concerned about outside threats now that he has gotten to use you the way that he desired? I have to say that I admire your staged horror and how quickly you were willing to abandon it to part your thighs.”

 
And it had been then that her previously gentile spouse reached upwards, grasped her sibling by the collar of his shirt and yanked him down in a jerk that was inhumanly fast.

Taras suddenly angled himself towards his latest victim, his eyes chillingly enraged, his tone low and told him, “The last man to speak so recklessly in my presence about my wife is currently feeding both fauna and insect where he is buried, Shankur. I do not know what has allowed such boldness in words to sprout, but before you make this mistake again I will 
personally 
cut every syllable from your mouth. Get up and leave.”

Asha watched Karan roll to his side, holding his face as he spat out words in Kannada.

If at all possible, Taras’ expression hardened further and he asked, “What about your ports?”

She frowned, having been unaware that he could understand their native tongue.

All he received in turn was silence. Sighing, he extended a hand, grasped a fistful of Karan’s hair and dragged him closer before repeating the words again, slowly.

Karan shook his head and snarled, “I will tell you nothing unless you help us find him.”

Taras scoffed and took him by the throat, squeezing. The change in her brother’s complexion indicated how little air he was receiving.

“You’re killing him.”

If at all, those words only seemed to appeal to him. Karan’s struggles grew slower and the men behind them grew edgy.

“
Taras,” 
Asha said with emphasis. “Stop.”

His steely gaze landed on her, eerily translucent. She was no longer dealing with the man. “I want you to let him go.”

He growled like the tiger he was, unwilling to relinquish his prey.

“He’s a nuisance obviously and I don’t defend his idiocy or that of my father’s, but killing him would bring nothing aside from a host of issues that I’m fairly certain you don’t have the time or patience to balance at the moment. Also, I would prefer not to witness the disposal of another body. At the very least not for months. So, I’m asking you—your 
wife
 is asking you—to let him go. Please.”

All signs of fury slipped from the hard lines of his face and finally, he allowed Karan to wiggle free. Using the tip of one of his boots, he nudged her brother away. “It is by your sister’s grace alone that you still breathe.”

Karan gasped for air as he got to his hands and knees. He glared in her direction as though she were a demon. “You would let him do this to me in front of your very eyes?”

Asha shrugged dispassionately. “I stopped him. What more do you want?”

“Some sign of anger,” he spat as he stumbled to his feet. “Why would he feel comfortable in harming me to begin with? Why is there no respect?”

She snorted a laugh. “You want what you are not willing to give? I see nothing has changed in the weeks that I’ve been gone.”

“And I see you are still a self-righteous bitch bent on playing maestro to those around you because your view of the world is pious and superior.”

Holding up a hand, she stopped Taras from moving when he would have lunged. “From the very time you discovered that ineffectual organ between your thighs you have assumed that I was to bow down to you and place rose petals before your steps. Our parents taught you to enjoy a life of incompetence and indulgence. They entertained your need to chase behind toys and attention; women and accolades. All while I was made to work for every bit of affection I received. Every ounce of praise given. Every position I was placed in. And do you know why, little brother? Because I was the threat.
I
was the one that stood to inherit it all once the time came. And you,”—Asha stood, still keeping a growling Taras at bay—“were the cub that could not unwrap his lips from the tit long enough to be more than an expensive burden. You are sad. You are weak. And if we were full-blooded tigers as opposed to the gods’ abandoned trinkets, you would have either been eaten a birth or left to starve while mummy and daddy moved on because between the two of us, I am the only one suited to lead. My view of the world is indeed pious and superior. I
am
a self-righteous bitch bent on playing maestro to those around me on the grounds that I would not be
asinine enough to stand on foreign soil and insult the wife of a man who could have both myself and my entire pride disposed of by noon the next day!”
she finished on a healthy bellow. Stopping, she gained control of herself once more while holding Karan’s shocked and resentful stare. “You will tell Taras all he wants to know. You will tell him
now
or I will stand aside and watch him peel the skin from you like one does a banana.”

His lip curled. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Her head tilted as she considered him. “Oh?”

“I don’t fear you, Asha,” he touted. “And I could give two fucks about your speech.” His eyes raked over her venomously. “I see nothing but a prostitute in a seat of power because she has somehow managed to bewitch a beast in the same way she has bewitched others all her life. Your
husband
is weak and sad. He traded most of his worldly possessions for you. He allowed himself to be manipulated into impotency because no one else would have him or the rain of insanity and chaos that he brings.”

There it was. There were the words. Asha felt the hot lance of both embarrassment and anger for reasons that should have been explicable, but weren’t. Once again she’d been categorized as something other than herself. As something other than Asha. And after she’d shown what she thought to be was grace for someone who obviously didn’t deserve it.

Taras,
her
Taras, had been told yet again that no one else would have him. No one else would be willing to love him. That Karan would be petulant and foolish enough to voice these thoughts made a rage raise in her that she’d never felt before. They’d tossed her aside and then had the audacity to plan a coup d’état on what she felt to be the only other soul on this quaking planet to understand what betrayal and neglect was? He had the gall to stand before her and degrade them both when she’d done nothing aside from ensure his safety and peace of mind up until she’d been made to leave?

That thing. That very angry, very wanton, thing within was suddenly triggered. Before she could call her hand back, Asha took on of her husband’s trademark letter openers—much like the one he had imbedded into his wall during his confession—and jammed it up to the hilt into Karan’s thigh.