Wouldn’t anyone’s?
Luckily for me, my father didn’t succeed in his twisted plans. My whole life, I believed that being Alisa Montes made me somewhat untouchable. If anything ever went wrong, I had Papa to fall back on, and he’d make sure I stayed safe.
Well, now I knew I’d put my faith in the wrong person. The man who kept the world safe no longer existed. Maybe he’d been pretending all along to care about justice. Or maybe he hadn’t, and I’d just focused on the good instead of all the ways he’d tried to mold me into the sweet little lamb he might someday need for his own grand plans.
So when Dante brought me back home and wordlessly held me while I cried, I realized something. I thought Dante was the dangerous one, and in many ways, he was. But he was the one who truly saved me from being sold off to monsters, while my father and his accomplices had been responsible for putting me on that stage.
If Dante hadn’t been there that day to get me off that stage, I couldn’t even imagine what would’ve become of me. Any dangerous man could have bought me. My father could have learned of the fuck-up my kidnappers made and voided the transaction, only to sell me off as a wife to some unknown people.
It seemed unreal, like this wasn’t my life. I knew that the only reason I wasn’t being forced to play wife to a stranger was because, for some reason, my father’s crew feared Dante Lebedev.
The only reason I was safe was Dante Lebedev.
And I, like a fool, leaned into that. I wanted to feel a glimmer of joy, like I used to back when we were together. That night on the couch, I kissed him to chase that same old, beautiful feeling just so I could feel like the world was okay again.
But I hadn’t expected him to pull away.
Hadn’t expected him to reject me with some vague lecture about head-clearing and boxing gloves.
I mean—what the hell?
He kissed me back. Ifeltit. That kiss wasn’t one-sided, not even close. So why was he acting like it never happened?
Days later, Dante still burned on my skin. I could still feel the crackle of heat from his lips against mine, and my toes still curled when I thought of it.
For those few seconds, I truly forgot all the bad in the world, that was, until he pulled away with some bullshit about boxing and clearing my head.
Who the hell rejects a woman, then offers her a punching bag as consolation?
“Goddamnit,” I groaned into my pillow, hating that I’d woken up with the same old talk in my head.
I threw myself at Dante fucking Lebedev, the same man who’d broken my heart four years ago, and ever since then, he had been avoiding me.
And I was tired of it.
Tired of tiptoeing around the truth between us. Tired of pretending I didn’t notice how his eyes lingered just a second too long, or how his breath hitched when we brushed against each other in tight hallways.
For the past three days, every time I saw him around the house and tried to make conversation, he’d rush off with something urgent to attend to.
At first, I thought nothing of it and truly believed it was just bad timing. But then it became glaringly obvious yesterday afternoon, when I was reading in the living room. He walked in, and I watched from the corner of my eye as he did a double take at the sight of me—then slinked out of the room so damn quietly, I knew he didn’t want to be seen.
If that wasn’t avoidance, I don’t know what is.
And honestly? It hurt.
Because I didn’t know where I stood with him or if he thought I’d been a mistake.
And I felt like an utter fool for thinking otherwise.
Was I supposed to forget that kiss?
Or was I supposed to believe I imagined all of it?
And since then, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. He broke my heart all those years ago, and only I knew the pain I felt in the months that followed. For a while, it felt impossible to forget him.
But I rode that wave of pain and made it through, only to end up at his house, living with him as his wife on paper. For a long time, I kept him at arm’s length, but somewhere along the way, the lines began to blur. He wasn’t innocent of that.
He was the one who started crossing those boundaries first, wasn’t he? Had I imagined that he was flirting with me all this time? Imagined the heat between us when he walked in on me in the changing room?
