She laughs.
The sound of it makes my blood run cold.
“You love me.” She says it back in English, flat and mocking, and her laugh builds into something wild and terrible. “Roman Volkov loves me. The man who signed my mother’s death warrant, who married me while the ink was still wet on her grave, who made me come screaming his name while he was keeping this secret—that man loves me.”
“Anya—”
“You know what the worst part is?” She’s still laughing, but tears are running down her face, and her hands have come up to grip my wrists where I’m holding her face. “I can feel myself still wanting you. Even now. Even knowing what you did. I look at you, and I hate you, and I want you, and I don’t know how to make those two things exist in the same body without tearing myself apart.”
“You don’t have to figure it out right now.”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do.” But her voice is softer now, broken, and her body is swaying toward mine even as her words say the opposite. “Don’t touch me like you’re allowed to touch me. Don’t look at me like I’m still yours.”
“You are still mine.”
“I’m not. I’m not anything that belongs to you anymore.”
“Then why are you still wearing my jacket?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers, and for the first time since I walked through the door, she sounds like the woman I married, confused and angry and wanting something she can’t admit to herself. “I don’t know why I can’t take it off. I hate that I feel safe in this jacket. I hate that it smells like you. I still—”
She stops.
“You still what?”
“Don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“I still feel you,” she says, and the words come out like they’re being torn from her chest. “In my body. In my skin. Everywhere you’ve touched me, I still feel your hands. And I hate it. And I want it. And I don’t know how to make it stop.”
I lean down to kiss her.
My hand slides into her hair, tilting her head back, and my mouth hovers over hers, close enough to feel her breath, close enough to taste the salt of her tears. This is the only thing I know how to give her that doesn’t require me to be better than I am.
“Glas.”
I freeze.
“Glas,” she says again. “Stop.”
“I was just going to kiss you.”
“I know.”
She used the safeword to stop tenderness.
“A monster I can fight,” she says, reading my face. “A monster I can hate. But a man who loves me? A man who kisses me with my mother’s blood still on his hands?”
“That’s the thing that will destroy you.”
“Yes.”
I look at my hands. Shaking. Large. Covered in blood from where she scratched my arms.
They look exactly like my uncle’s hands.
“Be the monster,” she says, and her voice is almost gentle now, almost kind, and that’s the worst thing she could possibly give me. “Be the thing I can fight. Don’t stand there crying, telling me you love me like that’s supposed to fix what you broke. Don’t try to kiss me into forgetting.”
