Her breathing is uneven, eyes wide and wild. “I got that much, dumbass.”
“Hedidmean marriage, Harper. There is no other way.”
The word hangs there. Her expression fractures into a flicker of confusion, then shock, then something like revulsion, then disbelief so sharp it almost cuts the air.
I see it in the way her spine straightens as though bracing for impact, in the way her breath leaves her chest in a small,fractured exhale. The air around us feels suspended, fragile like the second before a glass slips and shatters.
Her fingers curl at her sides. “So that’s it? My choices are to marry you or die?”
I want to tell her no. I want to tell her every lie that I can whip up this second, but lies are what created this hell to begin with.
“Those are the options,” I say, voice low, steady. Controlled enough that she won’t hear the part of me that wants to tear down every rule in this godforsaken system just to give her another way out.
Her laugh is sharp and fragile.
“Of course. Perfect. The man who once dismissed what I felt, what I wanted, is now the only one who can keep me alive. What poetic bullshit.”
I flinch, though barely. She still sees it. She always sees too much.
She moves away from me, pacing like a caged animal, each step sharp enough to cut through the room’s quiet. The city’s nightlights catch against her profile. She’s furious, but beneath the fury is the unmistakable tremor of someone pushed to an edge she never wanted to find.
Her voice is barely above a whisper.
“Do you evenwantthis, Damian?” She throws the word like a dagger.
Want. As if a man like me can ever have something he wants. When you are an Ignatov, wants are something you learn you can’t afford.
I answer like a blade meeting another blade.
“Want has nothing to do with it.”
The cruelty isn’t intentional, but the words still land hard enough that she recoils a fraction, as though bracing for a deeper cut.
“Survival,” I continue, quieter now, “is the only thing that matters in this world.”
She studies me, eyes narrowing as if she’s peeling back each layer of the stoic surface I’ve spent years constructing, searching for anything human that I haven’t buried.
Her voice softens, but the edge remains.
“You say that like you aren’t choosing this. Like you aren’t making the decision to bind me to you forever.”
Forever.
If she only knew.
My chest tightens with something I refuse to name.
Guilt? Perhaps.
Longing? More likely.
The twisted, unwelcome truth that part of me wants her bound to me. Some feral part of my soul has been circling her from the moment she walked back into my world.
But I cannot give her that truth.
So I give her the one she can survive.
“It’s the only way to keep you alive.”
