3. Valentina #3
“Everything I’ve built—” His voice has dropped to something low and taut.
“You’ve built nothing,” I interrupt coldly. “You brought mud into my kitchen last week. I had to clean it up, because apparently Connor’s great enforcer can put a bullet in a man but wiping his own feet is beyond him.”
I look at him in disgust. What a waste of an evening. “That’s what you are, Cillian. Underneath everything, you’re a man who can’t function in a home because you’ve only ever existed in a war.”
He shoves his chair back and stands up.
His red hair has fallen slightly across his forehead and he hasn’t pushed it back, and I don’t know why I notice that.
His eyes, in this light, are the color of deep water over ice.
“At least I know what a war looks like.” The brogue has thickened the way it does when something has gotten under his composure.
I’ve clearly bothered him and I should feel satisfied, except his voice has gone to that register that does something uncomfortable to my nerve endings.
“You’ve been protected from one your entire life.
You sat behind your brother’s name and your father’s money and your pretty face and called it surviving.
You’ve never fought for a single thing you have. ”
His eyes move over me slowly, like he’s disgusted with what he sees.
“You wouldn’t know how. Everything about you has been arranged—your education, the gallery, your friendships, this marriage.
You’re not a person, Valentina. You’re a project.
Someone else’s project, start to finish.
And you are furious because deep down you know the moment the Santoro name stops meaning something, you stop meaning something.
That is the most honest thought you’ve ever had and you will never say it out loud. ”
My chair scrapes back.
I am on my feet and I don’t entirely remember standing.
My hand has found my wine glass—the one with the wine I complimented because I was trying, I was trying—and two weeks of tension collapses into one single brilliant point of white-hot rage.
“I set this table,” I say, and my voice is shaking with how much I mean it.
“I ordered the food and I poured the wine and I asked about your day. I complimented something that was yours and I was trying. I was genuinely, actually trying to be a person who could make the best of something neither of us wanted, and you have spent the last fifteen minutes making absolutely certain I understand exactly how little you think of me.”
I look at him and I feel the full heat of it, all of it, every cold breakfast and every cutting remark and every morning I’ve timed my coffee specifically to avoid his face. “You are the most deliberately cruel person I have ever met and that’s saying something.”
“Deliberately cruel,” he repeats.
He tilts his head and looks at me and his expression does something I haven’t seen on him before.
It’s not contempt or anger.
It looks almost like pity, which is so much worse than either. “You want to know what’s actually cruel, Valentina? Your mother had to sit you down and tell you to try. Like you were a child being sent back into the classroom to apologize to someone you’d been mean to.”
His eyes don’t leave mine for a second. “You’re twenty-six years old and you still need your mother to tell you how to behave in your own marriage.”
He shakes his head. “And you walked in here tonight with your table set and your wine poured thinking that was strength. Thinking that was you making a choice.” He lets out a short exhale.
It’s not quite a laugh, but it’s colder and more deliberate.
“It was obedience. Same as it’s always been.
Every good thing you’ve ever done, every decent impulse you’ve ever had, it’s because someone told you to.
Your father. Your brother. Now your mother.
You follow instructions and you call it character. ”
He sits back down and leans in his chair looking completely unbothered, like this is a conclusion he reached weeks ago and has simply been waiting for the right moment to put on the table in front of me.
“You don’t have a self, Valentina. You have a very long list of other people’s expectations that you’ve mistaken for one. ”
His eyes move over the table—the food, the wine, the careful place settings—and his expression is almost sad, which nearly sends me into orbit because I cannot stand pity.
“And the saddest part? You set a beautiful table. You really did. It still didn’t make you anything more than what you’ve always been.
A very well-trained girl doing what she was told and calling it a choice. ”
The word girl detonates somewhere behind my sternum and my fingers tighten around the wine glass.
“Fine,” I hiss.
I throw the glass at his head.
My aim, it turns out, is terrible.
It shatters against the wall behind him in a spectacular explosion of red wine and broken crystal, and the sound it makes is enormously satisfying for approximately one second before the silence that follows swallows the room whole.