Chapter 39 #3
“I understand if you want nothing more to do with me after tonight,” I forced myself to say. “And I won’t stop you. We can remain married on paper, or I can give you money of my own—enough to ensure you’ll never have to worry again. But Valentina, please know it was never my intention to hurt you.”
I saw her confusion, the questions racing behind her eyes as she stepped closer.
“I don’t want your money, Marco,” she said, forcing my eyes to meet hers. “I don’t want your pity or your guilt. I want honesty. Why did you marry me?”
I fought the truth.
“Say it,” she pressed. “Tell me it wasn’t because you felt sorry for me. Tell me it wasn’t some twisted penance for what you did.”
I drew a ragged breath, heart pounding hard. “Valentina, don’t ask me—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Tell me it was because you wanted me. Tell me it was because you cared.”
“It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t charity. Is that what you want to hear?”
She stepped even closer, her eyes locked on mine, demanding more. I saw the desperation behind her stubborn determination, mirroring my own.
“I want a full answer for once,” she argued. “Do not make me walk out of that door, Marco. Not after asking for your honesty.”
Something about the threat of her leaving snapped the last of my resistance.
“Fine,” I bit out, the truth tearing free despite myself.
“I care. Damn you, Valentina. I care. I have always cared. From the moment you walked into my life and decided to fight me on every goddamn thing. I cared every time you defied me, every time you pushed, every time you forced me to see you as more than just another responsibility. I cared when I told myself not to, when I forced myself to keep you at a distance, when I pretended you meant nothing to me.”
Her breath hitched visibly, her eyes wide and searching mine as if she were trying to discern sincerity from manipulation.
“You say you care. Fine,” she whispered, vulnerability coloring her voice. “But caring can mean a thousand different things. People care about stray animals and cold weather. People care about keeping their shoes clean.”
“Valentina, that’s not—”
“Oh no,” she cut me off. “You do not get to avoid this. Not tonight. You’ve told me you care, and now I’m asking you a direct question—one you owe me an honest answer to.”
“Why?” I demanded, fear tightening my voice. “So you can use it against me later? So you can throw it back in my face when you finally realize this—whatever it is—is a mistake?”
“So I know I’m not alone in this,” she said gently.
“Because I’m tired of feeling like a fool every time I let myself believe this means something to you.
I need to hear it, Marco, because right now, I’m standing here feeling completely alone and terrified, and I need to know you’re just as terrified as I am. ”
“You want the truth?” I finally ground out, feeling exposed, vulnerable, and angry with myself.
“Yes! Why on earth would I still—?”
“I love you,” I finally admitted gently. “God damn it, I love you, Valentina. Is that what you want to hear? Does it satisfy you to know I’ve been reduced to this? To this complete, unbearable madness?”
She didn’t move. She watched me like she was waiting for the rest of it.
I hated that I had more to give. I hated that the words didn’t stop there; that the dam had broken and I couldn’t shove it all back down.
“I didn’t plan it,” I said, pacing now as if I were confessing to a crime.
“I didn’t want it. Jesus, I’ve spent my entire goddamn life making sure I didn’t need anyone, and then you walked in with your mouth and your goddamn questions, and suddenly, I’m thinking about you when I shouldn’t be.
I’m making decisions with you in mind. I’m letting you stay. I’m letting you in.”
I turned to look at her. “And I don’t do that.
I don’t let people in. Because every time I do, they leave.
Every single one of them. So yeah, maybe I married you out of guilt at first. Maybe I told myself that.
Because guilt I could handle. Guilt I understood.
But this? Whatever the hell this is? You? I don’t know how to survive you.”
I ran a hand over my face, exhaling hard. “I don’t know how to survive wanting someone this badly. Needing them. Needing you.”
I turned to face her again, my chest aching, every nerve exposed.
“I didn’t fall in love with you the way people say it happens.
It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t slow. It was inconvenient and loud and brutal.
It was terrifying. You got under my skin like a splinter, and every time I tried to ignore it, you pushed deeper.
And I let you.” My voice dropped, quiet now. “I let you in.”
She stood there as still as stone. “You—” she started with a brief pause. “You love me?”
And just like that, every instinct of mine screamed at me to walk it back.
To reel it in. Because I didn’t say that word.
Not because I didn’t feel it—I wasn’t some cold machine who didn’t feel things—but because when you said it, it meant something, and once it was out, you couldn’t take it back.
It became this thing people could either hold or throw back at you.
I’d had enough thrown back at me for one life.
I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Should’ve nodded, said something safe—some joke to pull the heat off it. But I couldn’t, because it was true. I was tired of pretending like it wasn’t.
But Jesus, the second she asked it out loud, I felt like I was seventeen again, standing on a doorstep I didn’t belong to, holding everything I owned in a garbage bag and waiting for someone to tell me I could come inside.
I didn’t know how to do this.
Not love. Not the kind that mattered.
I knew how to want people. I knew how to be useful. I knew how to make someone think they could depend on me. But being the person someone stayed for? That was foreign territory.
She stared at me like she wanted to cut me open and find the rest of the answer buried in there somewhere. And maybe she would find it if I let her. God knows, I wasn’t good at saying the things I actually felt—not unless someone dragged it out of me.
Finally, she said almost gently, “You look like you’d rather die than say that again.”
“I would,” I said, honest, a little hoarse.
“You’re not exactly easy to love either.”
I couldn’t help but smile faintly at that. “You love me?”
She rolled her eyes in irritation. “If I didn’t, I’d be in Sebastian’s bedsheets by now.”
Sebastian wouldn’t even know what to do with her.
“He still sniffing around?”
Valentina tilted her head at me. “He left. Said he was heading back to Chicago.”
“And what—he gave you an open invitation?”
She hesitated just long enough to make me want to hit something. “Said I’m always welcome. Told me I know where to find him.”
“You want to go?” I asked. “You want to follow him?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t act like this is a choice between you and him.”
“That’s exactly what this is.”
She stepped closer, lifting her chin like she was ready for a fight. “Then you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “You didn’t say no.”
“I didn’t say yes either.”
I moved toward her. “So say it.”
She rolled her eyes again, but this time it was softer. Almost reluctant. “I’m not going to Chicago, Marco.”
“Why not?”
“Because I prefer the war criminal in a suit who pisses me off and makes my life miserable in much more creative ways.”
“You prefer me,” I repeated, just to be sure.
She nodded as if she were admitting to murder. “God help me. I hate that I can’t be mad at you. I hate that you make me want to forgive the most repulsive actions.”
She meant every word, and that should’ve felt good. It should’ve felt like winning, right? She loved me. She was saying it. Standing in front of me, furious and shaking and still not walking away.
I didn’t feel victorious. I felt wrecked.
Because now I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I couldn’t tell myself this was just guilt or circumstance or some twisted marriage of convenience we’d both outgrow.
This wasn’t a phase.
This was the part where I realized I had everything I’d ever thought I couldn’t have, right in front of me, and all I’d done was make her regret it.
And still, she was staying.
And still, she loved me.
And I had no fucking idea what to do with that.
I’d never been loved like this before. Not with teeth. Not with fight. Not by someone who’d seen every ugly part of me and kept choosing to stand in the fire anyway.
I opened my mouth to speak and found nothing there. Only noise. Panic. So I said the only thing that felt honest.
“I don’t want you to forgive me.”
Her head jerked up like she wasn’t expecting that. “What?”
“I don’t want you to forgive me for what I did,” I said again, slower this time. “That’s not what this is. I don’t want you to love me because you’ve convinced yourself I’m redeemable.”
She stared at me, lips parting like she was about to say something. But I didn’t give her the space.
“Don’t make this about fixing me. Don’t make this some self-sacrificial Florence Nightingale bullshit where you love the monster into a better man. I didn’t earn that.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing?”
I shrugged, unsure. “I told myself you were temporary,” I said quietly. “That you’d leave like everyone else, and I could go back to being . . . whatever I was before.”
“And what was that?” she asked.
“Safe,” I admitted. “Lonely. But safe.”
She took a step closer. “And now?”
“Now I think I’d rather burn than go back to that.”
There it was. The truth. Not the pretty kind. Not the cinematic version. Just the truth, stripped raw.
And still, I wasn’t done.
“You don’t scare me, Valentina. Not the way you think you do.
I’ve been scared since the moment I realized I cared about you.
That I needed you. That I wanted you enough to lie, to stay, to marry you and pretend it was business.
” I rubbed a hand over my jaw, voice breaking a little as I kept going.
“And then one day, I looked up and I wasn’t pretending anymore.
I didn’t know when it had shifted—I just knew it had.
And I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to give you another reason to run. ”
She looked at me like I was the only man on earth. Like I was the only one dumb enough to break his own heart before anyone else got the chance.
“I didn’t run,” she said softly.
“Yet,” I muttered.
Her jaw tightened. “I’m still here.”
“For now.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No,” I said. Fast. Too fast. “I want to believe you won’t.”
And maybe that was the scariest thing of all. Not loving her. Not telling her I did. But hoping—for the first time in my life—someone might actually stay.
“Well, then I’ll show you,” she said, whispering gently in my ear like a promise. “And you’ll see in the morning I’m still in bed beside you.”
I stood there like a goddamn statue, trying not to lose my mind.
It wasn’t just what she was saying—it was how she was saying it. With certainty, like she wasn’t asking permission or offering anything temporary. She already knew exactly what I needed and was ready to hand it over without strings, without force.
I’d never been good at gentleness. I’d never trusted it. It had always felt like bait, but this wasn’t that.
And then—fuck—her fingers brushed the hem of my shirt lazily. She knew what that kind of touch would do to someone like me. Someone starving for it.
She flattened her palm against my stomach, right over the fabric, and just held it there slowly. Somehow, this was worse than anything frantic. It was intimate in the way that undid every bone in my body.
What the hell was I supposed to do with that? With her hand on me like it belonged there? With her saying things like that?
So when she took a small step back—just enough to glance toward the bedroom like it wasn’t even a suggestion but an inevitability—I followed.
I didn’t say I loved her again. I didn’t make any declarations or ask if she was sure.
I just followed.
Because the truth was, she could’ve asked for anything in that moment, and I would’ve given it. Hell, she didn’t even need to ask. She already had all of it. Every guarded thought, every aching inch of my loyalty, and every broken piece I’d hidden for years.
I wanted to believe she’d still be there in the morning. That she’d still choose to stay when the lights came back on.
Because if she did?
Then maybe I’d finally stop waiting to be left. Maybe I’d finally stop needing to be alone just to survive. Maybe I’d finally let myself belong to someone.
And maybe that someone could be her.