Chapter 36
BELLA
I don’t remember leaving the room. Don’t remember my hands pushing open the door to the grounds. The sticky heat of the summer night clings to my skin and makes every breath feel like drowning, and I keep walking because stopping means thinking.
And thinking means feeling.
Gia was his wife, and Luca betrayed her.
I stumble over something. A root, maybe, or a crack in the path. But it doesn’t matter. My body catches itself before my mind registers the near-fall, and I keep moving deeper into the darkness of the grounds, away from the lights of the chateau and away from him.
Luca wasn’t the big brother who stepped up to raise his baby sister.
He was exactly what Slava said he was.
And I grieved him. I wept for him. I built a shrine to his memory inside my chest and tended it with fury for years, stoking the flames of my hatred for the man who killed him.
Only to find that it was all a fucking lie.
I stop when my feet carry me to an ancient tree and lean against its massive trunk. Overhead, branches spread like arms reaching for something they’ll never catch. I lean against it because my legs won’t carry me anymore.
The bark bites into my shoulders through Gia’s clothes, and her necklace burns against my throat.
I offered it back to Slava. But instead of taking it, he put it back on me.
Now, under the sticky warm night, my guilt consumes me. Bite by bite, it feasts away at the walls I built up around my mind until it leaves me with nothing but an intense self-loathing.
Shame unfurls inside of me. I was jealous of her. I was jealous of a dead woman who was murdered for the sin of loving the wrong man. A wife ripped away from her husband. A mother torn from her child.
And I wanted to hate her.
No, I think, I still hate her. That’s the real shameful part. I hate her because I’m still jealous of her. Because Slava still holds a place in his heart the same way he holds a place for her clothes.
I hate myself for thinking it. Hate the small, feral creature inside me that looks at a murdered woman’s memory and sees nothing but a threat.
As long as Gia lives in his grief, in his penthouse, in the spaces between his breaths, I will never have him.
I tip my head back against the tree trunk and stare at the stars blurring through a haze of tears.
Is that what I want? Is that what this has become?
And then I’m crying again. Maybe I haven’t stopped. The tears feel permanent now, like they’ve been waiting my whole life to fall and finally found the fissure to escape through.
I want him. God, I want him so badly that it hurts.
That’s the truth I’ve been running from since the day I swore to destroy him. With every touch of his hand that lit my body up like a city at dusk, and every kiss that makes my heart skid into overdrive. I want Slava Romanov.
I want him to have me, to hold me, to take me apart and put me back together in all the wrong ways. I want to kneel for him. I want him to fuck me until I can’t walk because he wants to fuck me and not because he sees me as a vessel to reclaim a past he can’t change.
I want to hear him call me good girl and mean it because he wants me for me, and not because of the ghost of his dead wife.
But I can’t let him have me.
Because I am the reason he lost her in the first place.
He thinks the chain of tragedy started with Luca, but it doesn’t. It started with me—with a sixteen-year-old girl who was stupid enough to believe an older man’s attention meant love. Who went to a hotel room because her parents’ divorce had shattered her understanding of what love even was…
And that chain doesn’t end in the past, either.
The sob that tears out of me doesn’t sound human, and it fits me just as well.
Because I’m the monster in this story.
Not Slava. Me.
I don’t hear him approach.
Or maybe I do. Maybe some part of me has become so attuned to his body, that I can register his footsteps in the darkness, feel the displacement of air, and taste the particular quality of silence that follows him everywhere like a shadow.
His hands cradle my face, and he wipes away the tears with the pads of his thumbs.
When I open my eyes, all I see in their winter-gray depths is an impossible softness I didn’t know he was capable of.
“What did you mean,” he says quietly. “when you said you’re not who I think you are?”
His voice vibrates through me, and turns my bones into water.
“It doesn’t matter.” My voice cracks.
“Yes it does,” he says. “You’re crying.”
“People cry sometimes. I cry sometimes.”
“Not like this.”
He leans in close, and I realize that he’s on his knees while I’m hugging mine to my chest.
“Who hurt you, Bella?” His voice is low and heavy.
The words burn me from head to toe, and light me up together with his touch.
“No one hurt me,” I lie. “Not even you.”
That last part is the truth. Or at least I think it is. But it’s not, is it? He’s already hurting me—not physically, but with his mind. It’s just like how he’s already been fucking me in my head before he ever laid a single finger on me.
I take a deep breath, and try to jut my chin out, but I can’t. Not anymore. So, I glance away and mumble.
“You don’t want me. You just want to reclaim and fix the past.”
His brow furrows. But he doesn’t speak. Why won’t he speak? I want him to speak and prove me right.
So, I continue to talk, and this time, I reach for that bitter jealous core inside until the words come pouring out like a flood.
“You kept her clothes,” I whisper through clenched teeth.
“You kept them for years. And no matter how much you claim you don’t want this necklace back, I see the way you stare at it.
I’m nothing to you. Just a means to an end.
You don’t see me when you look at me. You see a way to rewrite an ending. ”
“Stop it.”
His hand tightens slightly on my face, and I look back into his eyes. Under the light of the stars, those gray eyes are silver.
“Do you really think so little of me?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that your heart belongs to Gia. That your heart has always belonged to Gia because you were stolen from her. And as long as your heart belongs to her, it’ll never belong to me. And I shouldn’t want it because it can’t belong to me.”
Something moves behind his eyes. “And why shouldn’t my heart belong to you?”
Because I was the reason you lost Gia. I was the reason Luca went to work for the D’Ambrosios.
“Bella…” he insists, and the last barrier around my heart falls away.
“Because I was the reason Gia died in the first place. I set everything in motion.”
“What do you mean you set everything in motion?”
“When I was sixteen.” I close my eyes. “My parents divorced. It was messy and brutal. My mother walked away and never looked back. My father Elio stayed home and drank himself sick every night.”
I trail off. The memory is a scar I stopped touching years ago because touching it made it bleed, but I’m bleeding now anyway.
What’s a little more?
“There was a man on our block. Marco Renpalucci. He was older than me. Much older. He paid attention to me when no one else did. Said things that made me feel seen and wanted. He made me feel like I mattered. I was sixteen and my family had just exploded and I thought—” I laugh, and it sounds like glass breaking.
“I thought I was in love. Thought he was in love with me. So one night, when he asked me to come with him to a hotel, I did.”
Slava is very still. His thumb has stopped moving on my neck.
“My father found out. And that was the only time he came out of his drunken stupor. He came with a bottle in hand, broke it on Marco’s face, and dragged me back home.
Once we got home, he screamed at me for hours about how I was throwing my life away, how I couldn’t trust men like that, how he was trying to protect me.
I hated him for it. Told him I wished he was dead. ”
“Then what happened?”
“Three weeks later, I got my wish.” I hiccup. “Marco had dangerous friends. They jumped my father outside of the liquor store, and beat him until his brains were splattered on the sidewalk.”
Slava’s lips press into a thin line, and a muscle twitches in his eye. But his hands on my face remain impossibly gentle despite his rage.
“The police said it was a random act of violence,” I continue. “That my father was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn’t. He died because of me.”
I take a breath.
“After Dad died, Luca stepped up. He was barely an adult himself, and suddenly he was responsible for a traumatized sixteen-year-old sister who had just gotten their father killed. We had no money left. Dad drank through whatever savings we had, and Mom wasn’t sending anything back.
So Luca did what he had to do to survive.
He found the men who killed our father and he killed them back, and then fled to someone who could offer him protection in exchange for his service. ”
“The D’Ambrosio Family,” Slava says quietly.
“Do you understand now? That’s what I mean when I said that I set everything in motion. My father died because of me. Luca became what he became because of that. And everything that followed was all because of me.”
I can’t say Alessandro. Can’t even let myself think his name too loudly in case Slava somehow hears it in my silence.
“That’s why your heart can’t belong to me, because I was the one who shattered it in the first place,” I finish.
I’m waiting for his expression to change, to curdle into disgust, and for the warmth in his hands to turn cold before he steps back to look at me the way I deserve to be looked at.
But he doesn’t.
“You were a child.” His voice is gentle in a way that breaks something in me.
“I was old enough to—”
“No, you weren’t.” His hand moves from my neck to cup my jaw, tilting my face up toward his. “What happened to you was not your fault.”
“But my actions had consequences—”
“Yes. Consequences. But not culpability.” His thumb brushes away a tear I didn’t feel fall. “You were not the one who beat your father to death. You were not the one who pulled the trigger in his vengeance. You were not the one who decided Luca’s path. And you were not the one who betrayed Gia.”
He stops. Something flickers across his face.
“I can’t blame you.” The truth escapes before I can stop it. “And you don’t get to blame yourself either.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It is now.”
I stare at him. The winter-gray eyes, steady and certain. The jaw tight with something that might be its own pain.
“Do you want my heart, Bella?”
I do. With God as my witness, I fucking do.
I nod.
“Then you’ll have it.” He inches closer. “Because if these past weeks have taught me anything, it’s that holding onto the ghosts of the past hurts no-one but ourselves. That waiting for vengeance is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.”
I can’t help the sad smile curving up on my lips.
“But what about the guilt?”
Not just for the past, but for the present too?
“It’s yours to deal with however you want,” he replies. “All I can do is help you with it.”
His familiar heat returns, seeping into my skin and settling in my bones through the humid air. He’s close now, so close that I can feel his heartbeat, or maybe that’s mine, drumming away in my ears like a warning.
Not until you ask me to.
“I want you to hurt me,” I breathe.
There’s no more defiance left in my voice. Only meek and wanting submission.
His hands move down. One cradles my neck while the other hooks under my arms. And then I’m lifted up onto shaky feet until his body presses mine against the tree.
I can feel every inch of him—his broad chest against my tingling nipples, his powerful arms tightening around my belly, his pounding heart beating in time with my own, and the unmistakable throb of his erection pushing between my legs.
“How do you want me to hurt you?”
The question cracks me open because he’s not refusing anymore. He’s not lecturing me or telling me that I need to forgive myself or any of the things a normal person would say to a woman falling apart against a tree in the dark.
He’s meeting me in the dark, in a place where neither of us should ever want to go.
“Put me on my hands and knees,” I tremble. “Do to me what you’ve wanted to do to me from the very beginning. Make me scream. Make me yours. Take everything you want from me until there’s nothing left of me that can ever belong to anyone else. Because I’m yours.”
“Is that really what you want?”
The question is soft and careful. It’s the final guardrail before we both careen over the edge.
I look into his eyes and I tell him the truth. “Yes.”
For a long moment, there’s nothing. Just the sticky heat and the stars and the sound of my heart trying to escape my chest.
Then his hand around my neck tightens until I can feel it pressing against the racing pulse of my throat. The darkness creeps back into his eyes. His jaw clenches, and then in a low, husky voice, he whispers.
“On your knees, malyshka.”