Gia was his wife, and Luca betrayed her.
I stumble over something. A root, maybe, or a crack in the path. But it doesn’t matter. My body catches itself before my mind registers the near-fall, and I keep moving deeper into the darkness of the grounds, away from the lights of the chateau and away from him.
Luca wasn’t the big brother who stepped up to raise his baby sister.
He was exactly what Slava said he was.
And I grieved him. Iweptfor him. I built a shrine to his memory inside my chest and tended it with fury for years, stoking the flames of my hatred for the man who killed him.
Only to find that it was all a fucking lie.
I stop when my feet carry me to an ancient tree and lean against its massive trunk. Overhead, branches spread like arms reaching for something they’ll never catch. I lean against it because my legs won’t carry me anymore.
The bark bites into my shoulders through Gia’s clothes, and her necklace burns against my throat.
I offered it back to Slava. But instead of taking it, he put it back on me.
Now, under the sticky warm night, my guilt consumes me. Bite by bite, it feasts away at the walls I built up around my mind until it leaves me with nothing but an intense self-loathing.
Shame unfurls inside of me. I was jealous of her. I was jealous of a dead woman who was murdered for the sin of loving the wrong man. A wife ripped away from her husband. A mother torn from her child.
And I wanted to hate her.
No, I think, Istillhate her. That’s the real shameful part. I hate her because I’m still jealous of her. Because Slava still holds a place in his heart the same way he holds a place for her clothes.
I hate myself for thinking it. Hate the small, feral creature inside me that looks at a murdered woman’s memory and sees nothing but athreat.
As long as Gia lives in his grief, in his penthouse, in the spaces between his breaths, I will never have him.
I tip my head back against the tree trunk and stare at the stars blurring through a haze of tears.
Is that what I want? Is that what this has become?
And then I’m crying again. Maybe I haven’t stopped. The tears feel permanent now, like they’ve been waiting my whole life to fall and finally found the fissure to escape through.
I want him. God, I want him so badly that it hurts.
That’s the truth I’ve been running from since the day I swore to destroy him. With every touch of his hand that lit my body up like a city at dusk, and every kiss that makes my heart skid into overdrive. I want Slava Romanov.
I want him to have me, to hold me, to take me apart and put me back together in all the wrong ways. I want to kneel for him. I want him to fuck me until I can’t walk because he wants to fuck me and not because he sees me as a vessel to reclaim a past he can’t change.
I want to hear him call me good girl and mean it because he wants me for me, and not because of the ghost of his dead wife.
But I can’t let him have me.
Because I am the reason he lost her in the first place.
He thinks the chain of tragedy started with Luca, but it doesn’t. It started with me—with a sixteen-year-old girl who was stupid enough to believe an older man’s attention meant love. Who went to a hotel room because her parents’ divorce had shattered her understanding of what love even was…
And that chain doesn’t end in the past, either.
The sob that tears out of me doesn’t sound human, and it fits me just as well.
Because I’m the monster in this story.
Not Slava. Me.
I don’t hear him approach.
