Page 17 of Endless Love

No one has ever said anything like that to me before. No one has even come close. Nothing any boyfriend has ever said to me, any declaration of love—nothing has ever been like that. What Ivan is saying is the kind of thing that I’d always shrugged off as fiction. As the kind of emotion that no real person ever really has.

I want to believe him. But all the lies that came before that are too much, and too many. And what’s facing me now, because of those lies, is too overwhelming.

“Even if I wanted to believe you,” I say softly, “how would I even begin to know you’re telling me the truth?”

And then, as he looks at me with that same wrecked, miserable expression on his face, I turn and walk out of the door of the hotel room, into the cold night outside.

8

CHARLOTTE

The cold air is bracing, and it brings me back to my senses, a little bit. I close the door behind me, not caring that I don’t have the key—sooner or later, Ivan is going to come out here after me, anyway. But I need a moment alone, away from him. I need a wall between me and him, some kind of space to think about everything I’ve learned and what’s happened.

This one day feels like it’s lasted a week. It’s hard for me to reconcile that twenty-four hours ago, I was in a bar with Jaz, having a drink. I still believed Ivan was who I thought he was. I didn’t know Nate had been attacked. I didn’t know that the Bratva was a real thing. I was going to go home, sleep off the too many drinks I had on a work night, and wake up probably a little hungover in the morning. I was going to go to work, text Ivan, and set up another date.

I never realized how quickly an entire life can shatter. Even Nate’s cheating couldn’t have prepared me for this. That took away a five-year relationship and forced me to reframe my plans for my romantic future, but it didn’t take away my job, my home, or my friends. A sharp, bitter laugh spills out of my lips as I remember how thoroughly broken I’d felt right after that. How ithad been the biggest betrayal I’d known. How it had felt like the most impactful, hurtful thing to ever happen to me.

The worst sundering of something in my life that had ever occurred. I couldn’t imagine it getting worse than that.

I had no fucking idea how bad it could get.

And somehow, Ivan’s lies hurt so much more. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. I had five years of memories and plans with Nate that were stripped away in an instant, but somehow, the last few weeks with Ivan being ripped away and reframed feels like a knife that’s digging so much deeper. Maybe it’s because nothing with Nate ever felt that profound, or meaningful—not like those few dates with Ivan did. With Nate, he always checked off my boxes, made me feel like I could cross things off the to-do list offind a boyfriend.

Handsome.Check.Polite.Check.Decent job.Check.Gets along with my friends.Check. Isn’t controlling.Check.

But he didn’t like going on dates with me that weren’t his thing. He’d tell me to take my girlfriends instead. He didn’t go out of his way to make time for me, or try new things. He didn’t encourage me to be more adventurous. And he definitely didn’t ever make me feel the things in bed that Ivan did.

He never said anything like what Ivan just said to me, either.

The best moments of my life so far have been the ones I’ve spent with you.

I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling tears drip onto my cheeks. Everything Ivan just said to me is the kind of thing that twenty-four hours ago, I’d have been thrilled to hear from him. Maybe a little shocked, because it would have felt so soon, but still—I would have believed him. I would have believed that I’d somehow been swept up in an intense, passionate, whirlwind relationship, the kind that Jaz always told me existed and that I never believed in.

Now, I don’t know what to believe.

Think about your future,I tell myself firmly, scrubbing my hands over my face to wipe away the tears. How I feel about Ivan, or how he feels about me, isn’t what matters any longer. Not right now, because he isn’t my future. Not anymore.

The idea of wiping my old life away and starting a completely new one, with a new identity, leaving everything behind and never speaking to my friends again or going back home, makes me feel a grief so intense that it makes me feel as if I can’t breathe. Like a death—and I suppose, in a way, that’s exactly what it is. A death of myself, my life, my dreams, my relationships.

I can see how someone like Ivan—if he’s telling me the truthnowabout his life and what it entails—would see that as a good thing. As a chance for a clean slate, a fresh start. But I can’t fathom it being anything but a nightmare. A lonely, lost existence, where I have no direction and no plan.

It’s the complete antithesis of how I’ve lived my whole life. And when I said I wanted adventure, to try to be less uptight, to try to branch out—I meant traveling to a new country asmyself, or maybe just…going to a new restaurant without looking the menu up first. I didn’t mean burning every bridge and starting completely fresh, reborn as a new person.

That feels impossible.

But what other choice do I have?I lean my elbows on the rusted railing of the balcony, burying my face in my hands. My skin feels dry and rough—without my skin care products and after the hard water of the shower this morning. I don’t feel like myself. And I don’t know how I’m meant to make decisions right now. I feel completely unmoored, cut loose from everything familiar.

If Ivan is telling the truth, this is the only way to escape his father. His brothers. TheBratva. And while a part of me thinks that he’s lying, that he wants me to depend on him and himalone so that he can keep me here with him, another part of me isn’t so sure.

He’s said, over and over, that that wasn’t his intent. That it’s not what he wanted. And he’s the only source of information I have on just how dangerous the Bratva are. On his claim that they’re inescapable, unavoidable, unless we start fresh. That they want to do the terrible things that he’s hinted at.

My only other option seems to be Agent Bradley. And while on the surface, heshouldbe the person I trust, the person I should go to—I can’t shake the instinctive feeling that I had from the moment I met him. That feeling had nothing to do with Ivan. It was before I even saw Nate get out of the car. Everything in me screamed that Bradley was someone I shouldn’t trust. Shouldn’t get in a car with, or go anywhere with.

And then there was Nate. I press my face harder in my hands, resisting the urge to scream into them. His getting involved in all of this has only convoluted it more. I think of what Ivan warned me of earlier, that if I go to Bradley, I’ll also be going back to Nate, and that he’ll take the humiliation Ivan inflicted on him out on me?—

That feels even more unthinkable. Nate has never been violent. I never feared him, not even during that last argument, when I found out about his cheating. Even when he sent me those texts, I just ignored them, assuming it was the tantrum of a man who wasn’t getting his way. I didn’t fear himhurtingme.

But I think of the satisfied look on his face when he saw me. That flicker of anger in his eyes when he looked at Ivan, and said that we’d talk about how I let Ivan touch me. I think of how I thought I knew Ivan, and how wrong I’ve turned out to be. Of all the horror stories women always hear of domestic violence, of women who never believed their partner would hurt them until it was too late, of boyfriends who no one saw it coming from until it happened.

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