Alice met my gaze directly.“Because I see how he looks at you.And I see how you look at him when you think no one’s watching.And I need you to understand that the man who hurt you isn’t the whole story.”
My cheeks flamed.Did she know?Could she tell what had happened in that hallway?
“He’s terrified,” Alice continued, her voice gentle but relentless.“Not of you.Of what you make him feel.The last time he loved someone, he watched them die.The only people who should have protected him threw him away instead.Every time you get close, every time something real starts to form between you, he does something to push you away.Because if he never lets you in, you can never destroy him.”
I thought about what had happened in the hallway.The way he’d made me beg.The cold satisfaction in his eyes when I fell apart.I’d assumed it was about power.About proving his dominance.
But what if it was about fear?What if every cruel word, every possessive touch, every reminder of who owned whom was just a shield against the possibility of loss?
“That doesn’t excuse what he does.”
“No,” Alice agreed.“It doesn’t.I’m not asking you to forgive him.I’m asking you to see him.The whole him.Not just the monster he shows you, but the broken child underneath.”
I stayed with Alice for another hour, listening to stories about Raphael’s mother.The sculptures she’d made.The garden she’d loved.The way she’d laughed at terrible jokes and cried at beautiful music.By the time I left, I had a picture in my mind of the woman who’d created the man downstairs.A woman who’d been soft and kind and artistic.
A woman who’d been murdered by the man she loved.
I found him in his study.
The door was open, and he sat at his desk, a glass of whiskey in his hand despite the early hour.He didn’t look up when I appeared in the doorway.The room smelled like leather and old paper and expensive liquor, the scent of him concentrated and overwhelming.
“Alice told me about your mother.”
The glass froze halfway to his lips.For one heartbeat, two, he didn’t move.Then he set the whiskey down with a soft click and turned to face me.
His expression was carved from ice.
“Get out.”
“Raphael—”
“I said get out.”He stood, and there was nothing distant or lost about him now.He was all sharp edges and cold fury, every inch the predator Clara had warned me about.“Whatever sob story Alice fed you, whatever pathetic tragedy she dredged up to make you feel sorry for me, forget it.It changes nothing.”
“I’m not asking it to change anything.”
“Then why are you here?”He stalked toward me, and I held my ground even though every instinct screamed at me to run.“Come to look at me with those soft eyes?Come to tell me you understand now?That you see the wounded little boy behind the monster?”
The cruelty in his voice should have made me flinch.Instead, I saw it for what it was.A shield.Deflection.A wall thrown up so fast it was almost desperate.
“I came because I wanted you to know that I know.”
“Know what?”He stopped inches from me, close enough that I could smell the whiskey on his breath, that familiar darkness underneath.Close enough that my body remembered what he’d done to me this morning and responded despite my better judgment, heat pooling low in my belly even as my mind screamed at me to stop.“That my father was a murderer?That my mother died screaming?That I spent fourteen years in a school where the teachers thought beatings built character?”His smile was a knife’s edge.“Congratulations.You’ve unlocked my tragic backstory.Does that make it easier to spread your legs for me?Knowing I’m damaged goods?”
The words were designed to wound.To push me away.To make me hate him again so he could go back to being the monster instead of the man.
I refused to give him the satisfaction.
“You’re not your father.”
Something surfaced in his eyes.Just for an instant, so fast I almost missed it.Pain.Raw and real and quickly smothered beneath that mask of cold control.
“You don’t know anything about my father.”
“I know he killed the woman he loved.I know you’ve spent your whole life terrified of becoming him.”I held his gaze even as my heart pounded so hard I could feel it in my throat.“And I know that’s why you do what you do.The control.The cruelty.You’re so afraid of losing control that you crush everything before it can get close enough to matter.”
His hand shot out and grabbed my chin, the same grip from this morning, hard enough to bruise.“Careful,” he said softly.“You’re starting to sound like you think you know me.”
“Maybe I’m starting to.”
