Elijah nodded his head. “Yes, my uncle needed some kind of leverage against Cordeau. Cordeau didn’t have any weaknesses.”

“With the exception of Catarina,” Eli said. “She was the one thing that made him vulnerable in a world of other sharks.”

Beside him she stirred, tension coiling even tighter. He kept his eyes on her but she didn’t look up at him, she was looking at Elijah.

“He made it clear that day I wasn’t anything to him.”

Eli’s belly knotted. Was there hurt in her voice? Of course there was. She’d been a child and back then, she had no one else but Cordeau. If he’d shown in front of company she was nothing to him, she would always feel like nothing.

“He did,” Elijah said.

“How?” Eli asked.

She flinched. Hard. For the first time she tried to pull away from him. His fingers dug into her waist, holding her still, holding her to him. Her hand slid over his, fingers trying to remove the vise-like grip he had on her.

“He insisted she read to us, and when she stumbled through a passage, everyone laughed. He laughed the loudest and said something about Catarina being an empty but decorative head.”

Eli felt the sudden heat in her body as she flushed a deep rose. She was humiliated all over again. He hadn’t expected that either, but it stood to reason. Childhood experiences shaped everyone. Catarina’s childhood had not only been traumatic, but she’d grown up thinking she wasn’t worth anything to anyone.

She was beginning to actively struggle against him, fighting, not him, but her past. Elijah had brought it too close and the dark ugly memories were flooding her mind.

Eli leaned down, his mouth a whisper from her ear. “Settle,” he advised softly. “This is all crap. It’s over. You aren’t with him, and you aren’t what he said you were.”

He transferred one hand to the back of her head, shaping her skull with his palm, pushing her face into his rib cage and holding her there. Was it possible they all had Cordeau wrong and Catarina meant far more to him that he let on? That entire time, when he was convincing everyone around him, Catarina included, that she meant nothing, that he was even embarrassed by her, was Cordeau really protecting her from his associates?

Eli didn’t want to think so. He didn’t want to see Cordeau as having any redeeming qualities, but the truth was that no one was one-dimensional. All that time, Cordeau could have been pretending indifference to protect her. He tried not to think about the incident when she’d fallen out of the tree and Cordeau had nearly lost his mind. Had that been the act of an indifferent man?