Her eyes lift to mine, wet and furious at once.
“He hated me for something that started before I was even born.”
“Yes.”
Her voice trembles now. “That’s not fair.”
“It isn’t.”
A tear slips free.
Something hot and vicious tears through me so fast it nearly blacks my vision for a second.
I catch it with my thumb before it gets past her cheek, but another one follows. Then another.
Fuck.
I hate tears.
They do something violent to me. Make my skin go too tight. Make my hands want to break whatever put them there.
But this—
This isn’t anger at her. It isn’t disgust. It isn’t impatience.
It hurts.
It hurts like I’m watching someone carve into her with no way to stop the blade.
“He put his hands on me because of something our parents did,” she says, like she still can’t believe the shape of it. “Because Iexist.”
Rage flashes so hard through me it feels clean.
“That’s why he dies.”
She looks at me then. Really looks. Not at the violence in the words. At the certainty.
At the fact that I mean every fucking syllable. And just like that, something in her gives.
Her shoulders drop. Her mouth parts.
The fury drains out of her face and leaves something far more brutal behind.
Exhaustion.
“Oh, Maks,” she whispers.
I shift closer immediately, my other hand finding her waist.
“I’m so tired.”
The words come out so small it almost doesn’t sound like her.
But then they keep coming.
“I’m tired in my bones,” she says, voice shaking now. “I’m tired of enduring. I’m tired of italwaysbeing something. One thing after another, one reveal after another, one hurt after another.” Her eyes squeeze shut. “I’m just so tired.”
I slide my hand fully up to her face and make her look at me.
