I stand, put out the cigar on a small ashtray, then straighten my spine. “I know what it’s like to live with survivor’s guilt. I’ve dealt with it every day for the last six years. The only reason I even got better is because Tildy saw something in me and made me undergo an evaluation five years ago in order to be hired. Now, maybe you went through something I can’trelate to, but you ain’t alone in the way you’re feeling. Not like I was. My brethren died, but it didn’t feel like I survived. It felt like I got left behind.
“You didn’t get left behind. You were saved by the very woman who loves us so much she killed the men that killed me, concoctedthe worstextraction plan with a murder of mafiosos, crossed an entire ocean, willingly let the man who raped herkissher, pissed on him, and then ran into a goddamn battlefield with bullets flying—” I pause and loom him over once more. “Did she even tell you, Maksim?” I ask even though it ain't my business to tell him the secrets she shared with me, but now that he's bein’ a damn reckless fool with my woman, fuck it.
“Tell me what?”
“You know how badly Sabrina wants to be a mom?”
He blinks at me and arches a dark brow in confusion, telling me she's kept him oblivious. “What does that have to do with this?”
“Sabrina thought she was pregnant, Maks. Whole time she was trapped there, she thought she was pregnant and still ran into a warzone for you—us—with a smoking, glittering, hot pink gun and not a backwards glance, knowing the consequences. Knowing the possible outcome.”
That any of us could have died… that she could’ve lost the non-existent child in her womb.
A look of guilt crawls over his dumb handsome face and his hand balls up into a fist on his thigh.
I turn to leave the library, but I pause and speak over my shoulder, “Act right, Maksim. ‘Cause that duchess of yours don’t deserve less than the supposed king who claimed her. Everything she said was right, Maks. You fucking her like she’s nothing to you is exactly how your downfall begins. Soon, it won’t matterwhoyou’re fucking because hey, at least you feelbright… right? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got shit I gotta do.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Maksim.
Parker’s words ring loud in my ears an hour after he’s left the library. I’ve stared at the wall of books across me for just as long, ruminating over the information he gave me. I feel… hollow. My wife, as strong as she is, wants nothing more than to be a mother. We’ve had this conversation before where I’ve asked if wanting to be a mother is against feminism, and she laughed at me. Explaining that in her eyes, raising strong women is a kind of feminism. She believes and helpedmerecognize that being a mother is just as difficult as being a woman in a working field. That the job is twice as demanding. But it’s more so the work of rediscovering the power women wield in their bodies.“There will never be a moment more powerful in our marriage than the day you watch me go through labor and give birth to the future generation. You will hold a magnificent little thing in the palm of your hands and know that that child will exert generations of knowledge, carry our history, and teach us a few things as well…”
For a second I think of my mother. How much of the load she carried in her marriage, not just with raising me, but helping my father carry out plans between teaching neighborhood kids piano, hosting fundraisers, and being a wife and socialite. I get up from the sofa I've been left sedentary on, take a deep breath, and dab the cigar on the ashtray until it’s out.
Fuck, I came in here fucking smug as shit, and now I’m eating it. Goddamnit. I turn off the light and head up the stairs, taking them one by one as slowly as I can. I’m in no rush seeing as I have a lot to fucking apologize for. I emit a low, agitated groan and pausewith my hand on the crystal doorknob before opening the door to our bedroom, standing just outside the threshold, thinking of the right words to say to my wife.
I don’t have any other than ‘I’m sorry.’
Music softly fills the room, and I follow it to the bathroom, where I find Sabrina with her damp hair up in a bun and her cheek resting on her knees she’s brought up to her chest in the antique clawfoot bathtub. She’s facing the wall; the blush pink bubbles in the water are just below her knees, and I almost fall to mine to crawl to her. My chest aches at the view of my wife so… devoid of life once more. My heart is somehow beating too big and too slow at the sight of my wife’s usual poise so… somber. I did that. Not alone. There are so many factors hurting all of us from so many different angles, but I'm not helping. I’m hurting.
Parker was right to add on to my already bruised face. I deserved it.
“Sabrina,” I choke out as soon as I get to her.
“Just… leave me alone, Maksim… please,” she sobs softly.
“Ican’t,” I admit. My jaw flexes at the thought that maybe we’re worse than before.
She sniffs before turning her head to face me, and my heart weeps. Tiny, diamond-coated tears roll down her flushed cheeks. Her face is still angular and missing her usual softness, not having gained any of her weight back. I realize I haven’t seen her eat a fucking cupcake in what feels like years. Those usual mesmerizing verdant eyes of hers with slats of gray are red-rimmed and watery. Tears unlikely to end soon. “I’m fine,” she lies on a breath that feels like a shiver.
“Why didn’t you tell me you thought you were pregnant?”
“Becauseyoumattered more. I can have another child. I know how incredibly terrible that sounds. Christ, lately it feels like everything I blurt out is just the fucking worst.” She shakes her head. “Everything I feel on the inside lately feels icky and feels like it sticks to my insides like a consuming tar.”
“Sabrina—”
“Let me finish, please.”
I give barely a nod of my head and then she does so.
“I can have another child, Maksim. What I cannot have, nor find… is another you. If this version of you is all I get to have… then I’ll take it. No matter how much it kills me. If all you will use me for is to bear the future Giordano line, and the most I get called is your fucktoy—which, trust me, it’s hot in the moment—then so be it. I will still love you. I will love you with all I am and fight to bring my king back to me—” Her voice breaks. “Because I do not love you with my heart, Maksim… I love you with my entire soul. And that is mycross to bear.”
I reach forward and cup her face in my hand. “Nobody could replace you for me, Duchess. You’re everything I never knew I needed.”
“Then treat me like it, Maksim. Treat me the way I deserve.”
“I don’t know how right now,” I brood. “Shit happened to me, and I’m trying to figure it all out. There’s bits and there’s pieces. It’s all fucking fuzzy, and every time I wake up, I will the memories to come back and they won’t. You talk about tar sticking to your insides, and I feel like that same tar, Sabrina. Every move I make feels slow, every thought I have is full of thisneedfor more vengeance, but the person who did this to me, who ordered these people to do what they did to me, is dead. Not that I'm mad that you killed him, trust me, I’m glad I got to watch that happen. Every time I think about it, it soothes something in me. It’s this fucking nightmare that I can’t stop reliving every goddamn night like fucking clockwork,” I rush out. “It’s this fuckinganxietythat has me on edge.”
