Page 31 of Prince of Wrath

“You would be disgusted.”

“Have faith in me.” My throat tightens around the ugliest part of the truth.

“Every now and then…” I stop myself and press my tongue against my teeth. “No, that’s not true. Once a month, for the last five years, I fight in an underground club where anyone can enter, and the winner stays for the next match. A cage match. I don’t know if you have ever heard of MMA, but that is close enough. It is bloody and brutal and satisfying because…” I hesitate. “Because I need it,” I admit at last. “If I don’t destroy someone regularly, I feel like I’m losing it, like there is something beneath my skin trying to claw its way out. It helped a ton, even at work. My attention improved. I found a way to…cope.” My voice drops. “I am a violent man, Ella. I do not deserve you.” She shakes her head, as if she is watching a scene unfold incorrectly.

“Maybe, but…you use violence in a place where it’s contained and valued. I think… I think it’s okay, Tristan. There’s nothing wrong with that.” She blinks slowly, so close to passing out and still trying to reassure me with hands that can barely stay lifted. Trying to be my what? Girlfriend? Partner? Soulmate? The list keeps lengthening, and every possible outcome ends with the word wife, which should terrify me because it is far too soon, except I have never been more certain of anything in my life. Her hands lower to the blanket, weakened by exhaustion, but her eyes remain on mine even as sleep starts to claim her. I move closer, carefully enough that she can refuse me. She does not.

“Rest,” I murmur. She frowns, stubborn even at the edge of unconsciousness.

“Sign it,” she signs, the movement faint but unmistakable. My hands go cold. I see her lying barely clothed on the floor, covered with dried blood and the fresh letter V etched into her shoulder. I see myself entering my bedroom where she used to be, almost watching the scene from the window, breaking the fourth wall of my life, watching a horror movie happen live. With heavy eyelids, her lips form a hard line.

“I…” I straighten. “If you consent to it, I’ll carry you upstairs to my bedroom once you’re asleep.” She scans me, and I have the distinct feeling she can see past my fake confidence and coldness. Still, she nods before sleep wins over her, and she lets out a tiny sigh as her face shifts deeper into the cushion. Like I warned her, I carry her upstairs in my arms, step by step. When she is safely sleeping on my side of the bed, snuggling into my pillow and inhaling it, I tuck her in and walk out backward, soaking in every last second before closing the door.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

She is safe. Matt will be guarding her, and the house is surrounded by new security staff. This is not like last time. I corrected it. I did things differently. Yet the bitter taste of fear lingers in my mouth as I head outside and start my car. Brenton’s call interrupts my chain of thought halfway to Ashford Building.

“Sir.”

“Brenton.”

“There’s been a development.” He cuts through the small talk and gives me an update on Cold’s hunt. After finding the guards I killed, the police attributed the deaths to a “potential internal rebellion.” Which is exactly the kind of spin you can buy when you know the right people. I did not intend to spend the rest of my life in jail for killing Cole’s men, so I made sure I would not, greasing the right hands at the police department and holding thick, devastating pieces of dirt over the right people. And that was it. With mine and Ella’s depositions, and the large number of hostages they managed to exfiltrate, they now have enough evidence to arrest Cole Vodianov. He seems to be hiding at one of his uncle’s manors, some sort of fortress on the east side of the city. Brenton, the police, and the district attorney’s office are working to put him behind bars. It takes everything in me not to get my gun and handle things myself. But I need to let the police work and focus on Ella and my company. The police will only let me do so much while turning a blind eye. I need to let them do their job now. My schedule is packed with meetings, employee representatives to reassure, journalists to spin the story for, and a ship I have to keep from diving straight into the financial abyss. Still, I look at my phone, at the surveillance app open to Ella sleeping. My heart is walking outside my body now. I thought love was supposed to feel light and reckless. Instead, it feels like standing guard behind a door hiding the most precious treasure in the world, knowing I would risk my life over and over to keep it safe.

* * *

“Thank you for coming,” I say as Dr. Elias Keller steps into my office. “I know how unusual it is to see you outside of our appointments.” He removes his yellow, rain-darkened coat with the same precision he brings to everything, then folds it over the back of the chair opposite mine.

“My dahlias can wait,” he says, taking his seat neatly. He's in his late twenties, younger than I expected a therapist to be when I first hired him, younger than me by several years, with dark blond hair still damp from the rain, rectangular glasses, and the kind of face that somehow reminds me of an English professor. Always faithful to his scholar style, he wears dark velvet trousers, a beige shirt buttoned at the throat, and brown loafers that stand out in this setting. Behind him, the city presses itself against the glass walls, silvered by rain. My office smells faintly of coffee and leather. Two phones lie beside my laptop, both turned face down, both vibrating often enough to remind me that outside this room, my empire is still bleeding. To my left, the chessboard sits untouched, and the ghost of my silent princess appears there, seated in my chair while I stand above her. Even when she is not here, she is still everywhere. In the taste of my coffee. In the contracts I read, searching unconsciously for the letters of her name until I find them.

“We have an hour,” Elias reminds us, catching the time on his brown leather vintage watch before opening his notebook on his lap. “Where would you like to start?” I lean forward, elbows on my thighs, hands clasped between my knees because if I put them on the desk, I will start rearranging objects into parallel lines.

“I don’t know where to start.” He waits with that look that tells me he has done this a hundred times before. Waiting for vaults to open. My gaze lowers to my shoes, and I begin telling him about the last two months, which feels impossible because the last time I saw him was four months ago, before Ella existed in my life. I tell him enough without betraying the sacred moments we shared. I do not tell him about the sound she made in that cell after the gun went off. I do not tell him how fear follows her into the dark, or how I installed a small night-light in my bedroom so she would never have to wake up afraid of the shapes around her. Some things will always stay between us, kept in the secrecy of the trust she gifted me. Still, I tell him about Cole, who is not being mentioned for the first time. About Mara, about Ella’s father, about my public downfall and the current police investigation going on. Elias listens without interruption, his pen moving only occasionally. When I stop speaking, the smell of rain permeates the air. My phone vibrates again. I look only to make sure it is not Ella. It is not. Then it can wait.

“So,” he sighs at last, “your nervous system is under significant stress, and you’re trying to treat it like, well, a problem to solve quickly instead of… information.”

“Which means?”

“I would say that you are reacting normally to rather abnormal circumstances. There seems to be a sort of…conflict inside you. Fear, guilt, anger, exhaustion,” he clears his throat, “protectiveness.” His hands weighting invisible words in his palms.

“That’s one way to put it.” I lean back.

“As we’ve discussed in our previous sessions, Tristan, your emotions are not departments or businesses reporting to you.” He presses a finger to the bridge of his glasses, nudging them back into place. “Try to take them for what they are, information. Signals from your brain, trying to bring your attention to what has been ignored for too long.”

I rub a hand over my mouth. “Ella reopened something.” Rain meets the windows, blurring the outside world. “She makes me want things I had no business wanting.”

“What kind of things?”

“A life.” The word tastes unfamiliar. “Marriage, children. A house that isn’t just a place to sleep between meetings. I didn’t think I had a right to any of that. I still don’t know that I do.” He remains quiet, letting the rest come out. “And she’s younger. Much younger. After everything she has survived, I don’t want to pressure her into something she isn’t ready for. I don’t want her to think she doesn’t have a choice here.” Elias folds one hand over his notebook.

“Are you afraid she might stay because you feel safe to her right now?”

“I…” I look away. “I don’t think she would. She isn’t that kind of person. She’s… No. I don’t think so.”

“It’s important to be aware of an imbalance and to make sure you don’t exploit it,” he says. “But awareness is different from assuming she has no agency.”