My hands clenched at my sides, nails biting into my palms. “I’m terrified of you. But I can’t stop wanting you. And that terrifies me even more.”
I looked away, blinking fast.
“I’ve been fighting it ever since. Burying myself in tasks, in worry, in fear—anything to drown you out. But you keep slipping back into my thoughts. I hate myself for it. I hate that my heart doesn’t listen to reason.”
I looked back at him, eyes burning.
“So... if you have any mercy left,” I whispered, voice trembling, barely more than a breath, “divorce me. Go back to Greece. Chase your vengeance, find my sister—whenever, wherever—but leave me out of it. I’ve done nothing wrong. Let me go. Let me return to my life... my poverty, my invisibility... my small, miserable existence.”
My voice broke at the end.
“I can forget you then,” I said quietly. “Or at least... I can try.”
The room felt unbearably still afterward—like the pause before a storm decides which direction to break.
Tears streamed down my cheeks in hot, uncontrollable rivers, blurring the world until all I could see was the dark shape of him looming above me.
They fell freely, soaking into the fine fabric of Ruslan’s trousers, darkening the expensive cloth in ugly, undeniable stains.
I reached out without thinking, my hands shaking as I tried to brush them away—as if wiping the tears could undo the collapse that had already happened.
But my fingers only smeared the wetness further.
My hands slipped, useless, slick with humiliation.
The shame was almost unbearable.
I was on my knees—literally and figuratively—reduced to begging in front of a man who had stood over my grave and watched me break.
Ruslan stood.
He didn’t jerk away from me or shove me aside.
He rose slowly, deliberately, as if he were afraid of startling a wounded animal.
Each step backward felt like a widening abyss, the space between us stretching into something vast and unbridgeable.
When he looked down at me, his face was carved from stone—cold, resigned—but there was something else there too.
Not compassion.
Something closer to disgust... or pity.
“You know what, Elena?” he said quietly.
His voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that came before devastation.
“If I had to choose between my late wife—whom I never loved—and you,” he continued evenly, “I would choose her. Every single time.”
The words slammed into my chest like a physical blow.
My lungs seized. My heart splintered so violently I thought I heard it crack.
I sucked in a sharp, broken breath, my body folding inward as if trying to protect what little was left of me. Tears came harder now, choking sobs ripping free as I stared up at him, my mouth open, empty of language.
There was nothing left to defend myself with.
He didn’t stop.
