“Loving a man you barely know is pathetic,” he said flatly. “Don’t lie to yourself. This isn’t love. It’s desperation. A clawing need to be seen, to be chosen by someone—anyone—because you’ve never been chosen before.”
Each sentence was a blade, precise and merciless.
“And let me be perfectly clear,” he went on, his eyes locking onto mine with brutal certainty. “In this lifetime or the next, you will never have my love. Not until the day you die.”
My vision swam.
“The same way,” he finished quietly, “that I never loved my wife until the day she was lowered into the ground.”
Something inside me collapsed completely.
“Why?” The word slipped out, barely sound, torn from somewhere deep and raw. “Why are you like this?”
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then he exhaled—long, uneven—like a man carrying too much weight in his lungs.
His fists clenched at his sides, knuckles whitening, tendons standing out sharply beneath his skin. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, rougher, stripped of its usual iron control.
“First,” he said slowly, “because I’m incapable of it.”
I watched his jaw tighten, watched his gaze drift somewhere far past me.
“Do you have any idea what Al-Chapo did to me after he ordered my sister’s murder?” he asked, not looking at me now. “People talk about the beating. A hundred punches. As if that was the worst of it.”
His mouth twisted bitterly.
“That part was easy. Pain heals. Bones knit. Skin closes.” He shook his head once. “What came after—that’s what broke me.”
His voice faltered—not much, just enough to make my chest ache.
“There are things a man doesn’t come back from,” he continued. “Things that don’t leave marks you can point to. Things that hollow you out until love becomes a foreign language. Until trust feels like a trap.”
He finally looked at me again.
His eyes—those ruthless, merciless eyes—were glassy now, reflecting the lamplight like shattered steel.
“They carved something out of me,” he said quietly. “And nothing ever grew back in its place.”
Silence swallowed the room.
I saw it then—not the monster, not the executioner, not the man who had ordered my suffering—but the ghost of someone who had once been human and had paid dearly for it.
“It’s not just Yannis who’s traumatized,” he said again, more quietly now—almost as if the words were meant for the walls rather than for me. “I am too.”
His voice lacked its usual edge. It sounded worn thin, scraped raw by years of unrelenting pressure.
“We both wake up screaming,” he went on, staring at nothing. “Night after night. The same nightmares, dressed differently. The same terror that never loosens its grip. I fear sleep the same way my son does.” His jaw tightened. “I fear the moment my eyes close, because that’s when the past finds me again.”
He let out a bitter breath.
“That’s why I’ve failed him,” he said flatly. “Because I’m no better than he is. Because I’m just as broken.”
The admission hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
“Life doesn’t take everything at once,” he continued, voice hollow. “It takes it slowly. A piece at a time. It lets you think you can survive the losses—until one day you look down and realize you’re bleeding from places you didn’t even know could be wounded.”
For a moment, there was nothing but silence.
