I plant one hand beside his head against the door and lean in close enough that he loses a little of the smugness. “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“Watching you lose your composure because I touched my wife?” His brows lift. “It’s one of your most charming qualities.”
I let out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “You think this is funny.”
“I think you’re jealous.”
The bluntness of it catches in the air between us. “You don’t get to exploit my weakness and call it entertainment.”
His expression changes; the mockery eases at the edges, not gone, but sharpened by something more real underneath. “Exploit your weakness. Is that what I am now?”
I stare at him. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“No,” he says, and now there’s steel under the silk of his voice. “I know exactly what you think you mean.”
I drag my hand from his arm to the side of his throat and hold him there, not squeezing yet, just pinning him in place with the promise of it.
The contact changes his breathing immediately. He tries to hide it and fails. That knowledge gives me a dark little spike of satisfaction I don’t bother denying.
“Don’t play with me, Vincenzo.”
“You told me to stay away.”
“And that means you get to wave your wife in front of me like a challenge?”
A real crack appears in him then, quick and mean and deeply familiar. “You’ve had five months to decide what I am to you. Now you’re angry because I let you see what my life looks like when I’m not standing in your kitchen waiting for permission.”
I tighten my hand at his throat a fraction without thinking. His lashes lower for one dangerous second before he schools his face again. “You think this is about wounded pride? You think I watched you let another woman drape herself all over what’s mine and felt anything small enough to call it that?”
His eyes darken immediately. “What’s yours?” he repeats, and now he’s angry too, beautiful and venomous and finally speaking in a language I understand. “That’s rich coming from the man who asked me to stay away and then took five months to decide whether what we had was worth the inconvenience.”
My jaw locks. “It wasn’t inconvenient.”
“No?” His smile is gone now, burned clean off by the heat under his words. “What was it then, a strategic pause? A diplomatic review? Because from where I was standing, it looked an awful lot like you telling me to leave and then acting surprised when I actually listened.”
“You think that was easy?”
He laughs then, and there’s nothing amused in it. “You want to talk to me abouteasy? I’ve been the only one in constant agony for eight years.Eight years, Nikolaj. You woke up in my bed, looked at me like I was filth, and then I got to spend almost a decade remembering enough love for two people while you looked at me and saw an enemy. So no, I don’t particularly care how difficult five months of honesty were for you.”
The words hit hard enough that, for a second, I stop breathing.
I know he’s right; I knew it abstractly. Files, footage, recovered memory, all of it painted the shape of his pain in evidence and implication.
But hearing him say it like that—flat, brutal, and unsentimental—strips the romance off the suffering and leaves only what it really was.
Agony.
Long, quiet, relentless agony. And I did that. Even without choosing it or remembering it, I did that.
I know he’s right, but knowing doesn’t stop the ugly possessive rage clawing under my skin when I picture him touching anyone else. It doesn’t make the sight of her in his arms feel less like a blade dragged slowly across my chest.
“I didn’t ask to forget,” I say.
“No. You didn’t.” He shifts against the door, not trying to escape, but it’s enough to force me to feel the whole length of him where our bodies almost meet. “And I didn’t ask to remember alone.”
That shuts me up because there is nothing clean to say back to that.
I take a good look at him: his tie is still perfect, his eyes are bright with anger and bitterness, hair only slightly mussed from my shove. Arabella’s lipstick didn’t transfer anywhere obvious, which, for some reason, feels like mercy.
