Chapter 13
He sputtered, stumbling over his words as he searched for an answer. His mouth worked soundlessly for a beat, nothing coming out.
“What. Did. You. Just. Say?” I repeated.
He gulped, his eyes darting away before snapping back to mine, caught between shame and the truth he had spent so long hiding. He hesitated, struggling to force the confession past his lips.
“You were leaving me the night of the accident,” he said at last.
The world vanished around me.
I stopped breathing. My body refused to move, every muscle locked beneath the weight of those words.
I could only stare at the man standing in front of me.
No.
I stared at the liar standing in front of me.
“So,” I said, forcing the words through clenched teeth, “you lied to me.”
He met my eyes, misery written all over him, his face heavy with guilt. A ragged breath escaped him before he forced out a single answer. “Yes.”
I was leaving him.
A grim, vindictive relief washed through me. I hadn’t fallen so far that I’d decided to stay forever.
I took a step back, my grip instinctively tightening on the sword. His eyes flickered down to it, and he took a tentative half-step forward. “Do you… do you want me to hold onto that for you?”
My glare was sharp enough to make his mouth snap shut.
I sucked in a sharp breath. “At the hospital, I asked you point-blank if I was leaving you,” I said, anger tightening every word. “You looked me straight in the eyes and lied to me. Tell me, what else have you been lying about? What else are you hiding?”
“Nothing!” The word burst from him. “There’s nothing else. I don’t have any other secrets. I swear to you, I’m telling you everything.”
I nodded slowly. “Right. Of course. Except for the lying. And the withholding of critical information. Except for that, you’re an open book, aren’t you?”
His expression crumpled, but he had no answer. There was nothing he could say that would make any of this better.
I straightened. “Why did you lie to me?”
He blinked rapidly, refusing to let his tears fall as he kept his eyes locked on mine.
“You were lying in a hospital bed, injured. I had just watched you come so close to dying, and when you woke up, you looked at me like I was a stranger. I thought you were lying. I thought you were angry with me, that you were punishing me for everything that had happened. Do you have any idea how badly I wanted that to be true? How badly I needed to believe you were pretending because the alternative was believing you had truly forgotten me?”
His mouth twisted bitterly. “So, part of me wanted to test you. I lied and told you that you weren’t leaving, hoping you’d correct me. I was praying you’d snap and tell me this whole amnesia nightmare wasn’t real.”
His shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of him.
“And the other part… the other part was just a coward. If you’d truly forgotten me, I couldn’t bear the thought of you knowing how badly I’d failed you.
I couldn’t stand there and tell you that I was the reason you’d walked away from me.
I couldn’t put that truth in your hands and give you one more reason to leave me. ”
He let out a hollow, humorless laugh. “The joke’s on me, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what I did. You’re leaving anyway.”
“You know what I heard in that little speech?” I asked, holding his gaze.
“I heard how this is all about you.” I took a step forward.
“You thought I was punishing you. You wanted that to be true for you. You couldn’t stand the reality where you were forgotten.
” Another step. “You didn’t want me to know I was leaving.
You didn’t want to be left.” I was standing right in front of him now, close enough to see the flinch in his eyes with every emphasized word. “You. You. You.”
I spoke softly, every word laced with venom. “You are a profoundly selfish man, Cassian Sterling.”
He looked down at me, his gaze holding mine. “I’m selfish when it comes to you. You’re the one person I can’t bring myself to be selfless about. I can give up anything else. I can walk away from anything else. But I can’t let you go.”
I scoffed. “Don’t pretend this is some grand romance. You’re not the tragic lover you’re pretending to be. You are a selfish, lying, pathetic man who only cares about his own comfort.” I tilted my head, my eyes narrowing. “So, let’s try this again. What else are you hiding?”
He let out a strained breath. “I’m not hiding anything else. You have to believe me, Alessia.”
I offered him a thin, cold smile. “That’s the thing, Cassian. I don’t. I don’t believe a single word that comes out of your mouth anymore.”
His eyes screwed shut against the pain of the blow.
“I’ll still give you one chance,” I continued. “Tell me what happened on the night of the accident. Everything. Don’t you dare leave out a single detail.”
He opened his eyes, the shadows in them deepening. “Alessia… I don’t like to talk about that night.”
My smile widened. “Too bad I don’t care.” It vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by an unyielding coldness. “Now talk.”
I needed to know. I needed to know what final straw broke the back of a marriage that had endured so much neglect.
I hadn’t left him when he forgot me.
I hadn’t left when he didn’t have time for me.
I hadn’t left when he didn’t share parts of him with me.
So what happened that night? What was the final, unforgivable thing that reminded the woman I used to be of her own worth?
Was it really just a missed party? If it were me now, I’d believe that in a heartbeat. The current me would have left a man for far less.
But I had a hard time believing the Alessia who married him, the one who had forgiven him so much, would draw the line at a single missed event.
Something else happened.
Something worse.
And I was going to make him tell me what it was.
His eyes grew distant, pulled back into the memory. “I was at the office. We had a—”
“I said the night of the accident,” I cut in, impatience sharp in my tone.
“Not your entire daily itinerary. I know you weren’t at the party.
I want to know what happened after. What happened when you came home?
Actually, let’s start with this. When did you decide to finally grace me with your presence? ”
He looked toward the floor, every muscle drawn taut with reluctance, dread written across his face. “I came home… around 2 a.m.”
A low, mocking whistle escaped me. “Two in the morning? You stayed out that late for an obligation you supposedly didn’t even want? If that’s how you treat people you don’t want to spend time with, how do you treat the people you actually want to be with?”
He opened his mouth, a weak protest forming, but I sliced through it.
“No, wait,” I said, my eyes widening in feigned epiphany.
“You keep begging me to stay. So this is it. This is your blueprint for how you treat someone you desperately want. You lie to them, you forget them, you dismiss them until 2 a.m.” I tilted my head.
“It’s a rather flawed concept of ‘wanting’ someone, wouldn’t you agree? ”
“Alessia, I—”
“What happened next?”
His eyes moved restlessly around the room, searching for anywhere but my face, until they stopped near the entrance. He stared at that spot for a long moment, his gaze distant as he forced himself back into the memory.
“I came home and found you waiting for me. You were upset that I’d missed your party.
And I…” A shadow crossed his face as the memory came back to him.
“Instead of sitting down and talking to you, I just threw a ‘sorry’ at you and acted like that was enough. Then I walked away and took a shower before we’d even finished talking. ”
He swallowed hard, his eyes dropping to the floor. “You were standing there, waiting for me to give you something more than that, and I couldn’t even do that much. I left you with an apology that meant nothing because I was too caught up in my own problems to see what I was doing to you.”
I took a step back.
Of all the things it could have been—a dramatic fight, a discovered affair—it was this. Something so ordinary, so painfully familiar. He had come home, brushed aside my hurt, offered me a careless apology, and walked away.
That was what had broken us.
One thoughtless choice after another, each one driving us farther apart until there was nothing left between us.
It was the most believable thing I’d heard all night.
He saw my face change and rushed to fill the silence, his words tumbling out in a frantic attempt to explain himself.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you, Alessia!
I was just… so tired. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept properly.
The whole ride home, all I could think about was taking a shower and collapsing into bed with you beside me.
I thought I could talk to you the next morning, when I could actually be awake enough to give you my full attention. ”
He took a step toward me. “I had it all planned. I knew how hard the past few months had been for you, so I decided to take the next day off, just for us. I wanted to stay with you, spend the day together, and give you the time I’d been too busy to give you.
After that, I was going to take a few more days off so we could finally get away together.
Go somewhere, leave everything behind, and just breathe. ”
His jaw clenched, eyes tortured. “But then I came home and realized I’d missed your party, and I hated myself for it, Alessia. I hated it. But I just… couldn’t face another conflict right then. I needed sleep. One night of rest. One night to reset.
“I was going to talk to you the next day. Hell, I planned to talk to you the second I got out of the shower.” He stumbled over his next breath.
“But when I came out, you were leaving. You were walking away from me, Alessia, and I panicked. I couldn’t think.
I couldn’t make sense of what was happening fast enough to stop you.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what could possibly make you stay. ”