His eyes squeeze shut.
“Please,” I whisper, falling apart now. “Please forgive me. Tell me what you need from me. Tell me what I have to do to earn your forgiveness. I’m not even asking for your trust. I know I broke that.”
When he opens his eyes again, there’s so much in them, I can’t even begin to name it.
“I don’t know how to live without you,” he whispers, his voice drowning with so much agony, it tears straight through me.
I’ve never heard him sound like this. Never.
My hands tighten on his forearms as the tears spill faster. “I don’t want to live without you either.”
The gun slips from his hand and hits the floor with a sharp crack that thunders through the room, and when he gazes down at me, I feel it in every shattered place inside me. How much I want him. How much I need him. How badly I still want to stay.
His gaze moves over my face until it settles on my lips. “Ya by szhyog ves etot mir radi tebya.”
“What does that mean?”
His fist closes in my hair, his face strained with so much emotion, it leaves me burning beneath it. “That I would’ve burned this entire world down for you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
KIRILL
“Kirill.”She says my name like it hurts, tears spilling down her cheeks, and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to feel.
I shouldn’t care. Nothing she says changes what she’s done. To me. To us.
Killing her should be easy. I’ve killed men for less, and this kind of betrayal…it should end her. But I can’t fucking do it.
Maybe my father was right all along. Maybe I am weak. Maybe this is what happens when you let someone get too close, when you start to care in a way you were never meant to.
I had my suspicions after the park, after I saw her with that bastard, but when she went into my office and removed the painting, I didn’t stop her. I wanted to see what she was after. What she was planning.
I still don’t know.
Tapping her phone would’ve been easy. I could’ve had every answer handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that man.
I should’ve been. Trusting someone, it costs something. It always does.
When I watched her break into my safe and take the ledger, I knew that was probably what she’d been after all along. But thenshe found the file, and the look on her face—the confusion, the shock—it almost thrilled me.
It doesn’t matter that she knows. I have nothing to hide.
She’s the one who lied to me. The one who played me. All I’ve done since the moment she walked into my life is protect her, and she threw it all away like it meant nothing.
Didn’t she realize I would’ve helped her if she’d just told me? That I would’ve torn Eli apart for even looking at her?
How the hell am I supposed to come back from this?
But then she looks at me, really looks at me, with tears clinging to her lashes, and my chest twists. Because what I said was true. It was the truest thing I’ve admitted in a long time. I can’t—I don’twantto—live without her.
But how do I move past it?
Her hand comes up, brushing my cheek again, and a growl drags out of me, because even now, even after everything…every inch of her still feels like mine.
Her voice fractures around my name, thick with tears, and everything in me cracks clean in half. Whatever control I had left is gone.
I take her mouth like I’ve been starving for it. Rough, consuming, the kind of kiss that drags everything ugly and unspoken straight to the surface. My hand fists her hair, holding her exactly where I want her as she kisses me just as hard.
