I am not Natalia. Not a woman. Not the person who bandaged his head and fed him and brought him into her home.
Just a Kozlov daughter. A body to answer for somebody else’s sins.
“So that was all I was?” I ask. “A piece on the board? A body you could use to settle a score?”
“No.”
“It was at first.”
His silence answers for him.
I nod once, because apparently that’s the part that finally gets all the way in. Not the Andretti name. Not even the lie.
The fact that if the storm had broken a different way, I would be dead.
“If you hadn’t lost your memory,” I say, “do I get this conversation, or do I get a shallow grave?”
He looks like I’ve put a knife between his ribs.
“I don’t know,” he says.
He doesn’t rush to cover it. Doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t lie to me again.
“I don’t know who I would’ve been if that storm hadn’t happened. And that scares the shit out of me.”
Pain cuts through me so cleanly I almost fold around it.
Because I believe him.
Not enough to trust him. Not enough to forgive him. But enough to know he means it.
Which is worse.
I want to throw something. I want to claw the wallpaper off this hotel room. I want to go back three weeks and leave him on that beach, facedown in the sand, and walk the other direction and never look back.
But I didn’t. I picked him up and brought him home and cleaned his wounds and fed him and kissed him and slept with him and fell for him, and none of that was his fault.Idid that.Ichose that. And that’s the part I can’t get past.
Not that he’s an Andretti. Not that he lied.
That I chose this. That for the first time in my life, I reached for something because I wanted it, and it turned out to be the worst possible thing I could have grabbed.
I wish I could make myself hate him cleanly. I wish I could strip this down to something simple, something sharp and survivable. He lied. He’s the enemy. Leave. But it isn’t simple, because I didn’t fall for a mask. I fell for the man who made pasta in my kitchen and listened to Anna tell the same story twice and looked at me like I was something worth keeping.
Maybe that man is real.
Maybe he is also the man standing in front of me admitting he once meant to kill me.
I don’t know what to do with both of those truths living in the same body.
“Nat.”
“Don’t.” I swipe at my face with the heel of my hand. “Don’t say my name like everything is still the same.”
He drops his gaze. When he looks back up, there’s nothing polished in his expression. No strategy. No charm. Just a man standing in the wreckage of his own choices.
“You’re right. I lied,” he says. “I kept lying. And part of me told myself it was because I was trying to protect you, or trying to findthe right way, but that wasn’t the truth.” He pauses. “The truth is I was scared. I knew the second you looked at me like this, I’d lose the only good thing I’ve ever had.”
My chest pulls tight.
