Chapter 3 #3
I look away for a second because he’s too close to the bone, because he knows exactly where to press, and I am so tired of being known that well by the one man I should never have let this near.
“I had the woman on my arm because I had to keep up appearances,” he says when I look back at him. “And the entire fucking time, all I could think about was you staring at me from across the room like you wanted to set the whole table on fire.”
My mouth almost curves before I can stop it. “I did.”
“I know.” The faintest ghost of a smile touches his, gone as quickly as it comes. “I’m sorry anyway.”
That apology should not feel like this. It should not feel like relief scraping against a bruise. It should not feel like pain being seen and eased at the same time.
“She was a shield, that’s all. I needed one tonight because my father is already watching me too closely, and yours looked ready to skin you alive.”
That makes something in me go cold for an entirely different reason. “What?”
“He was watching you, Salvatore,” Ruslan’s mouth tightens. “Not casually. Watching. Like he’s already started asking himself the right questions.”
I swear softly in Italian.
“Exactly,” Ruslan mutters. “So yeah, I had a woman on my arm. Because if your father’s looking for weakness and my father’s looking for softness, then giving them a neat little picture to misunderstand buys us time.”
Us.
That word should not matter as much as it does. It matters anyway.
I look away again because the alternative is to look at him and know I’m losing this fight. “We should still end it,” I say, but there’s no strength in it now, and we both hear it.
His hand tightens slightly at my neck. “No.”
I scoff. “You can’t just say no and make that true.”
“Watch me.”
Despite myself, a laugh breaks from my mouth, quiet and bitter and too close to fond. He hears that, too. Of course he does. Ruslan misses very little when it matters.
Then his expression changes again, turning open in a way I almost can’t bear.
“Don’t ask me for that, Not to leave. Not to stop loving you. Ask me for anything else. Ask me to lie better, disappear faster, break somebody’s fucking teeth, whatever you want. Just don’t ask me to walk away.”
“Ruslan…” I say, and my voice betrays me completely.
His forehead comes down to mine, and suddenly we’re standing there breathing the same cold air, too close to be safe and too far gone to fucking care.
“I miss you when you’re gone,” he says softly. “I count the fucking months.”
I swallow hard.
“Six months,” he continues, almost to himself now.
“Six months of thinking about you in rooms you’re not in, hearing your voice in my head when I’m with other people, wanting to tear half these meetings apart because I know you’re three floors away and I still have to wait.
” His thumb moves once at the nape of my neck, the gentlest thing in the world. “You think that’s only physical?”
No. I don’t.
That’s the problem.
My hands, traitorous things, rise to his chest and stay there. I feel the steady thud of his heart under my palms. He goes quiet the second I touch him, as if he’s afraid any movement might break whatever fragile thing this is.
I should step back, but I don’t.
“No, cuore mio,” I say before I can stop myself.
My heart.
The endearment slips out raw and unguarded, and the look that crosses his face nearly undoes me. He closes his eyes for half a second as if the words physically hurt him, then opens them again and kisses me like he’s starving.
Not the brutal kind of kiss we start with when anger’s still burning through us.
This is slower, deeper, almost unbearably tender.
His mouth moves against mine with a kind of care that makes my throat ache.
I grip his shirt and kiss him back because, at this point, denial would be insulting to both of us.
When he finally breaks away, we’re both breathing harder.
He rests his forehead against mine again and lets out a shaky breath that would sound weak on anyone else and devastating on him. “There you are,” he whispers.
There’s too much peace there is in his voice when he says that. As if pulling me back from that edge matters more than whatever damage we’re doing just by standing here.
My fingers tighten in his shirt. “If you ever pull something like that again without warning me first, I’ll shove you off this terrace.”
He smiles properly then, small, boyish, and only half there because the rest of him is still too serious tonight. “You won’t.”
“I absolutely will.”
“Maybe,” he allows. “But then you’d miss me.”
“Arrogant prick.”
His thumb strokes my cheek once. “You love that too.”
I do. God help me, I do.
He smiles properly then, tired and real and so fucking dear to me it feels like a weakness with a pulse.
“I’m not ending this,” he says softly.
I should tell him that it isn’t solely his decision. Instead, I whisper, “Neither am I.”
His eyes close, and the relief that moves through his face is so raw it nearly destroys me. It’s too much. Too honest. Too unguarded for a man like Ruslan, which means I feel it all, like it belongs under my skin.
He kisses me one last time, brief and reverent and nothing like the filthy, reckless thing this started as two years ago, and I understand with brutal, sickening clarity that whatever line we’ve been pretending still exists between body and heart is gone.
It’s gone, and I don’t know how to want that less. Lust doesn’t beg or stand on a terrace after midnight asking to stay. It doesn’t apologize for another woman, knowing her sight cut into me and reached where it had no right.
I know there is no honest way left to call this only physical. Not when he says my name like it matters.
Not when I whisper, “cuore mio,” against his mouth, and he answers, “lyubimiy,” with a reverence that feels more dangerous than any threat his father ever could make.
Not when the fear in me isn’t about being caught, not really, but about what happens when one day one of us has to choose the table over the man standing in front of him.
I know that day is coming. I think he does too.
But tonight I let myself pretend that what lives between us might survive the men waiting downstairs to kill it.
That’s the worst lie of all.
And still, with my head against his shoulder and his hand in my hair, I tell myself one more and let him hold me while I do it.
Just six more months.
Just one more meeting.
Just one more time.