“You believe that?”he repeated, but this time his voice cracked open, loud enough to hit the walls and come back distorted. I didn’t flinch and I didn’t step back, but something inside me twisted, hard.
“Are you actually that fucking stupid, Rowan?”he snapped, taking a step toward me, fast enough that my body reactedbefore I did, muscles pulling tight, ready for something I couldn’t name.
“Your whole life,”he went on, his voice rising, breaking at the edges,“your whole miserable fucking life people have used you and you still stand there like an idiot trying to make excuses for them.”
I felt that familiar prickle under my skin, like needles, like something waking up.“Krystyna,”he said, and there was something almost amused in his voice.“You remember her, don’t you?”
My jaw locked.
“You remember how much you meant to her?”
Nothing showed on my face, but he saw it in my eyes anyway.
“Nothing,”he said flatly.
“You meant nothing, the only thing interesting about you was your cock. If you had died in that bed, she would’ve replaced you without even blinking.”
The words sank into the empty pit in my stomach.
“The only thing you were ever good for,”he continued, like he was carving it out to me instead of throwing it,“was what you could give her.”
My hands curled into fists at my sides and I didn’t even notice it before my nails pressed into my palms.
“That’s what you are,”he said.
“That’s what you’ve always been. So tell me,”he bit out, stepping closer again,“what makes you think your father is any fucking different, huh?”
That was the point where something in me finally turned.
“Like you Zwierek?!”I shot back, it tore out of me before I could stop it.
The silence that followed, fuck, it was instant. I took a single step toward him and saw it hit immediately. Something changed in his face. It wasn’t anger this time. It looked closer to the kindof reaction people have right before they realize a situation is slipping out of their control.
“...I’m sorry,”he said, his voice lower now in a way that felt far more unsettling than if he’d just yelled. He tilted his head, eyes fixed on me.“What the fuck did you just say?”
Everything inside my body collapsed all at once. It was too much, pushing up through my chest like it had been sitting there for years waiting for a crack.
“I haven’t been anything else to you either!”My voice tore on the way out, scraped, broke, came out wrong.“You’re not fucking different!”I shouted and I could feel it now. My eyes burning, vision pulling tight at the edges like my body was trying to shut something down before I could say it.
“You don’t get to stand there and talk about them like you’re better, like you didn’t do the exact same thing to me!”
My breath came out in short, uneven pulls. I dragged air in too fast, like I was trying to outrun something catching up behind me.
“You made me into something that worked for you,”I kept going, words crashing into each other now.
“You knew exactly what to do, when to push, when to pull, when to say just enough to keep me right where you wanted me.”I laughed once, but it sounded wrong and not even close to anything real.
“You made me think you cared,”I said it, and for a split second the words lost some of their force, like something in me almost pulled them back.
Then I pushed them out again with enough venom to make it clear I meant every word.
“You made me think you were trying to fucking protect me.”
My jaw clenched so hard it hurt. I stepped closer without thinking about it. Close enough now that I could see the small shifts in his face, the way his eyes followed everything, tookeverything in. That same look. That same fucking look like he was still reading me, still figuring out how to use whatever I was giving him.
“You’re not better than them,”I said again, but it didn’t come out steady this time. It dragged, dipped in the middle.
“You’re just better at pretending you’re not like them.”Something broke then.
