Page 82 of Ruthless Rustanovs

She had to finish the story. Not just for him, but for herself.

Sam took a deep breath, made herself calm down “So yeah, when I got off the bus, I took a detour to my favorite neighborhood sub shop. Ate a whole twelve-inch meatball grinder so I’d be nice and full when I got to my mother’s and wouldn’t have to stay too long.

If I hadn’t stopped to do that, maybe I would have gotten there in time, but I did and when I came through the door, my stepfather was standing over her body with a knife. ”

The image of her mother lying on the floor, her beautiful face frozen in a rictus of terror, like she’d known this would be the last beating, the one that ended her—that image came back to her like a perfectly preserved movie scene. So much blood…

“I know the statistics now,” Sam said, gritting her teeth against the pain of the memory.

“I know physically abusive relationships often escalate to murder. That forty-percent of murdered women worldwide are killed by their partners. That many women like my mother don’t think they’re deserving of good relationships, and their spouses alienate them from everyone they know, make them feel worthless, like they’re all alone… so they don’t seek help.”

Sam shook her head. “But back then, I didn’t take the violence seriously.

It was just this big thorn in my side, something I imagined my mom enduring for the rest of her life, because she was too dumb and weak to leave my stepfather.

So I did the worst possible thing. I left her alone.

I was her last resource and I left her alone with him. Made her beg me to come home.”

Sam’s voice cracked, as regret over her ignorance flared anew inside her chest. It took a few more shallow breaths before she was able to talk again.

“Anyway, they didn’t live in a great neighborhood and like a lot of people, my stepfather kept a gun in their apartment.

Near the door, in fact, so it was easy…”

Sam grimaced. “I don’t remember much, just being angry, and then the gun was going off, and I guess I was a better shot than expected, because the bullet hit him in the face.”

Sam wrapped Nikolai’s jacket tighter around herself, suddenly cold.

“So that’s how I ended up getting tried for murder.

Because technically, he’d already killed her.

There was no reason for me to kill him. Even my boyfriend couldn’t deal with that.

He visited me once in juvie to say he was sorry but his parents didn’t think he was equipped to continue associating with somebody who had my kind of issues.

He made it real obvious he thought I was a nut job for killing my stepfather,” Sam thought of her stepfather’s prediction when she moved out to live with Anthony.

“Too much trouble for a piece of ass, I guess.”

She recovered with a brave smile, “But luckily I had good grades and a decent court lawyer. She got them to try me as a juvenile, and the judge was a woman who believed the story she made up for me about self-defense. So I got very, very lucky.”

She sighed and finished with, “And that’s why I’m here today, walking around Greece with you instead of rotting away in the penitentiary system, just like my father.

And that’s why I started Ruth’s House, so no woman anywhere would ever be left alone with her abuser like my mother was.

And that’s why I do things like teach yoga and mindfulness along with providing counseling services, to give women the tools they need to get out of bad relationships and stay out of them. But trust me…”

She forced herself to look directly at him now.

“I’ve got baggage, too, but here’s what I’ve learned working at Ruth’s House: your past doesn’t matter.

Only what you do today matters. What you continue to do tomorrow.

If you want to be a good father to Pavel and to this baby, you can do it. I know you can. You just have to try.”

And there it was. Her long, sordid story laid out for him in full, so he could see she wasn’t some perfect parent, pre-made. That she was a human, who’d done some truly terrible things before getting to the place where she could properly mother a child.

She’d hoped her story would inspire him, but judging from his reaction it did the exact opposite. He glanced over her, opened his mouth… closed it again. Then he looked away. Just like Anthony had looked away from her when he’d been dumping her across a gray metal table.

His inability to speak, to so much as look at her, made Sam’s heart sink.

Why had she told him everything? He already knew most of it anyway from the court papers.

So why hammer it home here and now? This was why she never told anyone about her past. Well, except Josie—and even then, that was after years of knowing her, after hearing Josie’s own tragic story.

But she’d only known Nikolai for a few months, and the fact remained that she barely knew anything about him.

Yet she’d told this huge Russian guy everything—all because he’d read a couple of parenting books.

She couldn’t have been more pissed at herself.

They walked the rest of the way back to the hotel in awkward silence.