Chapter 3 #2
He’s left the top button of his shirt undone, while his tie hangs loose at the collar. His sleeves are rolled up, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a glass of amber liquid like he’s just stepped out for air instead of following me out here to finish ruining my night properly.
He looks unfairly beautiful in the half-dark. Too beautiful. My vice. My ruin. My fucking poison wrapped up in broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a mouth that’s taught me too well how to lose.
“You should go back to your partner for the evening,” I say, and the jealousy in my voice is humiliatingly obvious. I hear it the second the words leave me, and hate that too.
His brows pull together faintly. “She’s not my partner.”
I laugh once without humor. “No? You had her hanging off you for three fucking hours. Forgive me for misunderstanding.”
Whatever he expects from me, it isn’t this. I see it in the way his face changes—not much, but enough. The lazy ease drops right away, replaced by something serious as he puts the glass down on the stone balustrade.
“She’s nobody,” he says.
“She had your hands all over her.”
“She had my arm, there’s a fucking difference,” he says, stopping a few feet away from me.
I scoff and flick ash over the balustrade, watching the ember disappear into the dark. “That’s an interesting distinction.”
His jaw tightens slightly. “Salvatore.”
The way he says my name now is different from how he usually does—less heat and more careful.
“Don’t say my name like I’m supposed to melt because you finally decided to stop entertaining her in public.”
“She was there because I needed her there.”
I stare at him. “Needed.”
“Yes.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to know me better than that!”
The answer lands exactly where he means it to, right in the center of every weak place I’ve never successfully hidden from him. That’s the problem with Ruslan. He always knows exactly where to press. I resent him for knowing the shape of my weak points so well.
I crush the cigarette into the tray on the side table and straighten when I look at him. “We should end this.”
I’ve seen Ruslan angry. I’ve seen him amused, cruel, filthy, violent, bored, blood-slicked, and laughing, half out of his mind and looking more alive for it.
I’ve seen him with my name in his mouth and menace in his smile and enough arrogance in his body to drown a room.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look like this.
Not blank. Not stunned.
“Don’t,” he says.
I almost wish he’d smirk. Almost wish he’d laugh, throw some filthy line at me, turn this back into the version of us I can survive.
If he mocked me, if he made me hate him properly, I might still be able to walk away clean.
Instead, he looks at me like I’ve just put a blade to his throat, and I’m the one who has no right to be shaking.
I almost laugh at the fucking absurdity of it. “You don’t get to tell me not to.”
“I’m asking.”
That stops me for a beat, but I harden myself against it anyway. If I don’t, I already know I’m lost. “Whatever this is, it’s gone too far.”
His jaw tightens. “Because I had a woman on my arm downstairs.”
“Because it stopped being simple a long time ago! This isn’t sustainable, Ruslan.
It’s been two years since Vintermoor, and every six months it gets worse.
We disappear, we come back, we lie through our teeth in rooms full of people who’d gut us for sport if they knew.
You drag women around your arm, and I stand there wanting to kill someone over it, which is insane. Do you hear me? It’s fucking insane.”
His mouth parts like he means to interrupt, but I keep going because now that the wound is open, I’d rather bleed all over the floor than pretend it doesn’t exist.
“It was only supposed to be physical. A pressure valve. Something private. Something I can survive.” My voice cracks at the edges despite everything I do to stop it. “And if it’s not that anymore, if it’s become anything else, then that’s exactly why this has to end.”
Ruslan just stares at me for one long, horrible second, and when he speaks again, his voice is different from any tone he’s ever used with me before.
“Don’t lie to me just because you’re angry. If you want to tell me you’re done, fucking tell me. But don’t stand there and feed me that pressure valve bullshit like we’re still at the beginning.”
I stare at him, chest heaving now, and for the first time, I stop trying to sound dignified.
“I’m trying to salvage what’s left of my fucking sanity.
You are the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, Ruslan!
I can’t stop wanting you, and I can’t stop coming back, and I can’t stand there and watch you touch somebody else like I’m supposed to be above it.
I am not above it! I’m not clean or detached.
I’m in this so deep I can’t see the fucking bottom anymore, and I hate you for making me this weak. ”
His expression changes again, and this time it’s worse than anger.
It’s grief. Real, raw, ugly grief, sitting openly in a man who almost never lets me see it.
For a second, I genuinely don’t know whether I want to hit him or kiss him or collapse right there at his feet and let him watch me come apart.
That’s the real problem, I think. Not that this has gotten too complicated. Not that it’s too dangerous. Not even that I love him.
It’s that he loves me well enough to recognize the exact shape of my cowardice, and tonight I don’t have enough strength left to hide behind it.
“You had a woman on your arm and wouldn’t even fucking look at me.”
He lets out a breath through his nose, but it isn’t amusement. It sounds more like he’s trying not to snap right back at me.
“I had to,” he bites out, and then louder, angrier, “I fucking had to, Salvatore. You think I enjoyed that? Half the old bastards in that room spend their lives sniffing around for weakness, and the other half invent it when they can’t find any.
What the fuck do you want me to do, walk in there and stare at you all night?
Ignore every woman who comes near me and hand the whole room a knife and my throat? ”
The anger in him is real, but it’s not directed at me—that’s what makes it worse. He sounds cornered.
I hold his gaze and say the thing that’s been festering in me since the first second I see him with her. “You looked happy being out in the open with someone.”
He drags a hand through his hair and lets out a low curse before looking back at me.
“I played my fucking part tonight. Ruslan Dragovich, reckless heir, charming bastard, son who doesn’t give a shit about rules, who’ll put a pretty woman on his arm and make it look natural.
That’s what I gave them. That’s not the same thing, and you know it.
” His jaw tightens hard enough to sharpen his whole face. “I get that you’re angry—”
“I’m not angry. I’m fucking exhausted. I’m tired of pretending this is one thing when we both know it’s something else.
I’m tired of acting like I don’t feel you every time you walk in.
I’m tired of waiting for my father to finally notice the way I look at you and decide I’ve become a stain on the family name.
” I stop to catch my breath and finally give him my truth.
“I’m tired of lying to myself that this is only physical when it’s so fucking hard to walk away from you. ”
Whatever mask Ruslan was clinging to slips all at once. “It’s not only physical,” he says, and every word sounds torn straight out of him. “It has never been only physical to me.”
The words hit so hard I actually feel my body sway. He sees it, of course, he does. He misses fucking nothing where I’m concerned.
“Salvatore,” he says, then whispers, “lyubimiy, look at me.”
I close my eyes for one second. “Don’t,” I whisper.
Ruslan reaches for me slowly, and that somehow wrecks me more than if he’d just grabbed. He gives me time to stop him or pull away. Time to save us both from what happens if he touches me while I’m standing here this raw and this furious and this hopelessly in love with him.
I don’t stop him.
His hand slides around the back of my neck, warm and steady and awful in how right it feels, and my whole body betrays me by leaning into the contact before I can stop it.
“Look at me,” he says, and his voice breaks on the edges now, frayed and rough and too fucking honest. “Please.”
I do, because I’m weak for him in every way that matters. Because he asks and I break. Because that’s the truth of this, ugly as it is.
There’s no performance left in him now. No swagger. No careless Dragovich arrogance. He looks younger without it and more dangerous for it, because sincerity on a man like Ruslan is rarer than violence and twice as destructive.
“I’m sorry.”
The apology catches me off guard enough that I actually blink rapidly.
Ruslan doesn’t apologize. He’ll fight, taunt, sneer, provoke, drag people into corners with that filthy mouth of his, and make them either hate him or want him or both, but he doesn’t apologize.
Men like him don’t get raised to. An apology looks too much like surrender, and sons like Ruslan are taught early that surrender is just another way to die.
So hearing him say it now, quietly, with his hand still on my neck and that look in his eyes, feels more intimate than half the times he’s had me naked.
“That’s not the point,” I say, though my voice has lost most of its edge. “The point is that this keeps spilling outside the room.”
His eyes stay on mine. “Because it’s already outside the room.”
There it is. Not lust or convenience in the arrangement we both pretend we’re controlling.
The truth.
“Don’t say things like that,” I murmur.
“Why?” His voice turns rough. “Because then you can’t keep pretending it’s only fucking?”