But now, sitting here in the firelight, trying to summon those feelings and finding them increasingly distant—I don’t know how to answer.
“I thought I did,” I whisper finally, my stomach feeling sour. “I had never been with someone like Alexei before. He made me feel special. Like I was the only important person in the world.”
“But?” Dimitri prompts when I fall silent.
I bite my lip so hard I’m afraid I’ll draw blood. How do I tell Alexei’sbrotherthe next part? “But I don’t know if he felt the same,” I say in a small voice. “Sometimes I think—I think maybe I loved the idea of him. The forbidden romance.”
I’m thinking about all those red flags again. The canceled plans. The disappearing acts. The way he never wanted to be seen in public. The conversations that were always about him.
“He would cancel on me,” I hear myself saying. “A lot. Last minute with vague, bullshit excuses. And I’d forgive him because when we were together, he was so—” I search for the word but fall back on words I’ve said before. “Attentive. Charming. He’d apologize and promise to make it up to me, and I’d melt.”
Dimitri’s watching me intently now, his tea forgotten.
“And he’d disappear for days,” I continue, the words tumbling out now that I’ve started. “No contact, no explanation. Then he’d show up and act like it was completely normal like I shouldn’t be worried or hurt or confused.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
Did I ever. We had several fights over it, some so explosive they scared me. Alexei had been one of the sweetest men I ever met but his temper was the stuff of legends. “Yes. He always said it was family business. That Volkov business was complicated and he was protecting me by keeping me separate from it.” I laugh bitterly. “I thought that was noble at the time. Protective. Now I wonder if maybe he just didn’t want anyone to know about me.”
Dimitri looks aghast at my comment. “What makes you think that?”
"Because every time I asked about going public with our relationship—telling our families, or at least his friends—he’d deflect.” I hug my knees tighter, remembering how frustrated and worried I had been whenever he said it wasn’t time yet. “It was always an excuse—the timing isn’t right, things need to calm down first. But the timing was never right. Things never calmed down. And I started to feel like—like maybe I was a secret he wanted to keep.”
Dimitri is very still now. “Did he make you happy?” His voice is low.
Did he? I thought so at the time. But was I really happy, or was I just caught up in the excitement of it all?
“I-I don’t know,” I admit. “In the moment, yes. When we were together, yes. But looking back—” I stop, uncertain how much to reveal. “Looking back, I don’t know if what we had was real or if it was just?—”
“A fantasy,” Dimitri finishes quietly.
“Yes.” The word feels like a betrayal, but it’s also the truth. I look at Dimitri. “But I don’t know if he felt the same,” I say, twisting my fingers together. “Sometimes I think—I think I fell so easilybecause he said all the right things. But real love isn’t about grand promises and secret meetings and forbidden romance. Real love is?—”
I stop myself before I can finish that thought. Before I can say what real love looks like to me now. What it feels like.Whoit feels like.
The silence that follows is heavy.
“He was always good at making people feel special,” Dimitri finally says as he stares at the fire, and there’s a bitterness in his tone I wasn’t expecting. “He had a way of knowing just how to make you think you meant something to him. But he never let anyone really know him.”
He looks at me then, and the pain in his eyes is overwhelming. “Even me.Especiallyme, apparently. I thought I knew him. I thought he told me everything, but he was living this whole secret life, and I had no idea.”
The hurt in his voice makes my chest ache. I want to comfort him and reach across the space between us and take his hand. But that would be crossing a line, because sitting here in the firelight, talking about Alexei, all I can think about is Dimitri.
How different this feels from those secret afternoons with Alexei.
Alexei felt like a fairy tale—beautiful but ultimately fragile, existing in spaces between reality where consequences couldn’t touch us.
Dimitri feels like truth. Hard and unforgiving and impossible to ignore.
And I’m seriously a fucking piece of shit for thinking that.
“I think—” I start, then stop, not sure what I was going to say.
That I think about Dimitri constantly? That I’m terrified by how right it feels when I’m with him? That somewhere between hating him and being trapped by him, I’ve started to have feelings I have no right to feel?
But before I can figure out how to finish that sentence, Dimitri slams the walls back up. I can see it happen in the way his expression shutters and how every line of his body goes rigid.
“It’s late,” he says, his voice suddenly cold and distant. “You should get some rest. For the baby.”
