“Because I prefer the war criminal in a suit who pisses me off and makes my life miserable in much more creative ways.”
“You prefer me,” I repeated, just to be sure.
She nodded as if she were admitting to murder. “God help me. I hate that I can’t be mad at you. I hate that you make me want to forgive the most repulsive actions.”
She meant every word, and that should’ve felt good. It should’ve felt like winning, right? She loved me. She was saying it. Standing in front of me, furious and shaking and still not walking away.
I didn’t feel victorious. I felt wrecked.
Because now I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I couldn’t tell myself this was just guilt or circumstance or some twisted marriage of convenience we’d both outgrow.
This wasn’t a phase.
This was the part where I realized I had everything I’d ever thought I couldn’t have, right in front of me, and all I’d done was make her regret it.
And still, she was staying.
And still, she loved me.
And I had no fucking idea what to do with that.
I’d never been loved like this before. Not with teeth. Not with fight. Not by someone who’d seen every ugly part of me and kept choosing to stand in the fire anyway.
I opened my mouth to speak and found nothing there. Only noise. Panic. So I said the only thing that felt honest.
“I don’t want you to forgive me.”
Her head jerked up like she wasn’t expecting that. “What?”
“I don’t want you to forgive me for what I did,” I said again, slower this time. “That’s not what this is. I don’t want you to love me because you’ve convinced yourself I’m redeemable.”
She stared at me, lips parting like she was about to say something. But I didn’t give her the space.
“Don’t make this about fixing me. Don’t make this some self-sacrificial Florence Nightingale bullshit where you love the monster into a better man. I didn’t earn that.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing?”
I shrugged, unsure. “I told myself you were temporary,” I said quietly. “That you’d leave like everyone else, and I could go back to being ... whatever I was before.”
“And what was that?” she asked.
“Safe,” I admitted. “Lonely. But safe.”
She took a step closer. “And now?”
“Now I think I’d rather burn than go back to that.”
There it was. The truth. Not the pretty kind. Not the cinematic version. Just the truth, stripped raw.
And still, I wasn’t done.
“You don’t scare me, Valentina. Not the way you think you do. I’ve been scared since the moment I realized I cared about you. That I needed you. That I wanted you enough to lie, to stay, to marry you and pretend it was business.” I rubbed a hand over my jaw, voice breaking a little as I kept going. “And then one day, I looked up and I wasn’t pretending anymore. I didn’t know when it had shifted—I just knew it had. And I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to give you another reason to run.”
She looked at me like I was the only man on earth. Like I was the only one dumb enough to break his own heart before anyone else got the chance.
“I didn’t run,” she said softly.
“Yet,” I muttered.
