I hated him for it.
Still do.
And now I understand exactly how a man gets there.
I think of Ayla with my name on her skin and blood on her face. I think of her saying I love you like it was a confession and a wound all at once.
Bile climbs hot into my throat.
Too much.
Too many fucking feelings all at once.
I want Kaya dead.
I want my men blind. I want Ayla healed and back in my bed. I want to shake her until the lies fall out. I want to never hear those three words again.
I close my eyes for half a second.
Weakness,Nikolai’s voice says.
Maybe.
But she’s still mine.
I brush past Vaska, open the apartment door, and step inside.
She’s on the couch. Wrists bandaged. Face bruised. Too small in the middle of all this wreckage and still somehow taking up the whole goddamn room.
Her head lifts the second she sees me.
For one second, neither of us move.
I don’t know what she sees on my face.
I don’t want to know. I just know what I see on hers.
Fear. Exhaustion. And that stubborn streak still there under the damage, like she’d bite me if she had enough blood left in her mouth to do it properly.
Good.
I can work with that.
I shut the door behind me and cross the room.
She tracks me with her eyes, but she doesn’t flinch. Not even when I stop right in front of the couch, close enough to see the tremor moving at her jaw.
I look at what Gabriel did to her and something black shifts under my ribs.
The split lip.
The bruising.
The wrists.
I catalog every mark and every one of them lands the same:too much damage.
I step closer. She doesn’t cower.
