"I know you better than you think. I know you hate this life and everything it's taken from you. I know you built that wall of ice because it was the only way to survive inside your father's world. I know you came to me in Prague because you were trying to burn down your own future, and I know it didn't work because you can't burn something down when part of you still wants it to stand."
My throat tightens. I swallow against it. "That's a lot of assumptions."
"They're not assumptions. They're observations. I've had plenty of years to make them."
I don't have a response to that. Even though I always have a response. I always have the next line ready, the deflection, the cutting remark that keeps people at a distance. But Aidan isn't people. Aidan is the man who held me in a hotel room in Prague while I pretended I wasn't falling apart, and he didn't say a word about it then, and he isn't throwing it in my face now.
He's just standing in front of me, steady and sure, telling me he sees me.
It's the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done.
"So what do you expect from me?" I ask. "In this marriage. In this house. What do you actually want?"
He doesn't hesitate. "Honesty."
I blink. "That's it?"
"That's everything. I don't want the Tanya Savitskaya you show the world. I don't want the ice queen or the dutiful wife or whatever version of yourself you've been rehearsing on the drive over. I want the woman who kissed me in a bar at midnight and meant it. I want whatever is underneath all of this." He gestures at me, and I know he doesn't mean the dress. He means the armor. "That's all I've ever wanted. And I’m hoping that one day you feel like you can be Tanya Orlova, and like who she is."
I stare at him, and I feel it happening. The thing I swore wouldn't happen. The careful, controlled exterior I've spent my entire adult life constructing is cracking, all because he's standing on the other side of it, patient and certain, and asking me to open the door myself.
I don't open it. Not all the way. But something shifts in me, something loosens, and when I speak, my voice doesn't have the chill in it that it would usually have.
"I don't know how to do that," I say. And I mean it. It's the most honest thing I've said in years.
Aidan
Standing in the living room of the stables I converted into a home while trying to banish her from my mind, she just told me the most honest thing she's probably said to anyone in years.
I don't know how to do that.
Five words from a woman stripped down to something raw and uncertain, looking at me like she's waiting for me to use it against her.
I won't. I'd cut off my own hand before I used her honesty as a weapon.
"That's okay," I say. "I'm not asking you to figure it out tonight."
She watches me. Searching for the catch. For the angle. I imagine every man in her life has had one, and she's been trained to find it before it finds her.
"Can I tell you something?" I ask.
Her chin lifts a fraction. That automatic defense mechanism, the slight elevation that makes her look like she's staring down at you even when she's not. "Can I stop you?"
"You can always stop me. That's the point."
Something flickers across her face. She doesn't respond, but she doesn't look away either, so I take that as permission to go ahead.
"The morning after," I say. "I woke up and you were gone. The sheets were cold. Your clothes were gone. There was nothing left in that room to prove you'd been there at all, except I could still smell your perfume on the sheets."
Her expression doesn't change, but I see her hands tighten against the fabric of her skirt. A tiny movement. The kind only someone who's spent years watching her would catch.
"I lay there for a long time," I continue. "Staring at the ceiling. And I thought about going after you. Getting dressed, going downstairs, finding you at breakfast or in the lobby or wherever you were, and telling you that what happened between us wasn't nothing."
"Why didn't you?" Her voice is barely audible.
"Because you weren't ready to hear it. And because chasing you when you'd clearly decided to run would have proved every assumption you had about men in this world." I pause. "So I made a different promise. Not to you. To myself. That I'd find a way back to you. That I'd be patient enough and smart enough to make sure that when it happened, it happened right."
She stares at me. Her lips part, just slightly, and I watch her process what I've said. She's fast. Brilliant, really. I can practically see her turning the words over, testing them for weaknesses, looking for the manipulation.
