“You know.” He folds the gauze once, precise. “You just don’t like the answer.”
My chest goes tight.
Because yes, the answer is humiliating.
The answer is that Maksim made me feel less alone in the broken parts of myself, and that’s the kind of weakness that gets women like me killed.
So I say nothing.
And Vaska, infuriatingly, lets the silence do the rest.
I sit on the couch with my face throbbing and my wrists burning and my mouth clamped shut around the one answer I can’t give him without feeling stripped open.
He finishes taping fresh gauze over the worst of the skin he cleaned on my wrist. His fingers are steady. Efficient. Like the pain is just another fact to work around.
Then he looks at me.
“If your goal was to destroy him,” he says, “why tell him the truth before someone else could?”
My throat tightens.
I stare at the coffee table. The grain of the wood blurs for half a second before I blink it back into place.
“It didn’t matter anymore.”
“Not what I asked.”
His voice doesn’t sharpen. That almost makes it worse.
I drag in a breath through my nose and regret it immediately when the bruise there pulses hot.
“Gabriel already had the ledgers,” I say. “Santo saw me. If Maksim heard it from anyone else, I’d be dead before I could explain.”
Vaska says nothing.
Just waits.
He’s forcing me to hear it. Forcing me to hear what I left out.
I look up at him finally and hate how still he is. How unreadable. How impossible it is to tell whether I’m helping myself or digging deeper.
“I didn’twanthim to hear it from someone else,” I say.
There.
Small. Ugly. True.
Vaska’s expression doesn’t change.
“Why?”
One word.
That’s all it takes to make my chest go tight again.
Because I loved him.
Because I couldn’t stand the thought of his face going cold while somebody else told him I was a lie.
