“The right way?” My voice cracks loud enough to bounce off the hotel walls. “The right way?”
My laugh comes back, uglier this time.
“Bynot telling me?”
I shove past him deeper into the hotel room. The bed is still unmade from this morning. His sketchbook is on the nightstand, open to a half-finished drawing of the dunes back in Moratoc, and the sight of it makes me want to scream because even his art feels like a lie now. Every gentle thing he did was built on top of something monstrous, and I decorated my own cage with it.
I grab my bag from the closet. I don’t have enough money for a flight, but I have enough for a cab to somewhere that isn’t here.
“Natalia, stop. Please.”
His hand catches my arm.
I flinch.
For one suspended second, everything in the room goes dead still.
Luca freezes.
Not just stops. He recoils. Takes two full steps backward, and his hand drops to his side like it’s been burned. The look on his face.God.Like I’ve just confirmed something he suspected about himself. Like I’ve shown him exactly what he is.
I have never seen a human being look that devastated in real life.
Good, a vicious little voice in me whispers.Good.Let it hurt.
His mouth parts, but no sound comes out.
The silence stretches so tight it could snap.
The air conditioning hums. Vegas pushes its muffled noise against the window, all that manufactured brightness out there, completely indifferent.
“I would never hurt you.” His voice is barely there. Scraped raw. “I couldn’t. I swear to God, Natalia.”
“You already did.”
He absorbs that like a blow. I watch it land in the way his shoulders pull in, in the way something in his face seems to cave under its own weight. And I hate that some broken, disloyal part of me still notices his pain.
I do not get to care about his pain right now. I do not get to feel sorry for the man who was going to put me in the ground.
“I know the amnesia doesn’t excuse any of it.” His voice is rough enough to scrape. “But when I washed up on that beach, I didn’t know. I didn’t know who you were, who I was, any of it. And by the time I did, I was already...” He runs a hand through his hair, and I hate that I know the gesture. “I was already gone for you. Completely. I should have told you immediately, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I kept waiting for the right moment.” He grimaces. “There wasn’t one.”
“You still had a choice, Luca.” My throat burns so badly the words come out thin. “Every day after you remembered, you had a choice. You stood in my kitchen. You came with me to see Anna. You slept in my bed. You let me keep falling for you while you knew exactly who you were.”
His face goes white at that. Good. Let him wear it.
“Why?” I whisper. Then louder, because whispering is not enough for this kind of hurt. “Why?”
He knows what I’m asking. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. When he finally speaks, every word sounds dragged over broken glass.
“Because my family wanted revenge. Because your family took someone from mine, and I told myself that made you fair game. That if ending you ended the war, then that was what had to happen.”
Fair game.
A cold wave crashes over me from head to toe.
