Page 111 of In Love with the Devil

“Fake. It was all fake–”

“But why?”

“It was his thing.” Julian shrugs.

It’s too much for me to bear, all the lies. I know Julian is waiting for me to respond, but I don’t want to look at him. I sit up and stare at the sheets, ashamed that my stalker, kidnapper, torturer, rapist had to save me from the man I thought to be the good guy, the man Imarried. The idea of him saving me doesn’t fit with everything else that has happened between us–all the sick shit he’s done to me.

“Why did you save me?”

He pulls me so that I turn to face him. He's sitting up too, now. “No one else gets to have you. Not even death. You’re mine.” He pauses and I can tell he’s itching to say something but holding back.

“What?”

“Did you love him?”

“No. I loved the life he was showing me." It's the truth. "He never asked me to marry him. I just suddenly found myself in a white dress I’ve never seen with his mother–”

“She wasn’t his mother.”

I sigh. “I didn’t know how to say no to the life I’ve always dreamed of; a family that sat down for dinner and joked around, a boyfriend who worked hard, dressed nice, treated me like a queen, never forced his dick into my ass, never enjoyed hurting me.” Julian's eyes narrow into slits of rage, but I don’t care.“He never hit me, or branded me, or impaled me, or forced me to live a year in the dark, or got me pregnant when I begged him not to, or hid my baby’s body from me–”

“I didn’t hide anything! You left, God dammit! At the very first chance, you left us!”Julian yells then stands up, obviously wanting to put some distance between us to avoid killing me. I flinch at the shouting and the anger in his words. Standing at the edge of the bed, naked, he sucks his teeth and pushes his hair back. “You willingly fucked him. Right?” His voice is deeper, raspier, and his eyes are that of the devil.

"Julian–"

"Do you realize I haven't touched another woman since the day I met you?" he whispers but each word carries a world's worth of bitterness.

His question steals all my courage and forces me to swallow deep. “Julian–”

He closes his eyes and raises his palm. “No. Give me a minute, Astoria.”

The tension in the room is electrifying. How can he not understand? "Julian. You can't demand love and loyalty from me when all you do is torture my body and mind." I don't know how else to explain it. "We are here, together. What happens now?”He's still calming himself, refusing to look at me.

It seems to take forever. He's in a trance when he says, “I buried the remains of our child underneath the almond tree, where you and I used to sit, every day.” He swallows hard and meets my gaze. "D-do you remember what really happened?" There's a sob stuck in his throat.

Julian returns to me as I shake my head and wince at the pain. My eyebrows quiver. The memory crashes onto me. “I knew something was wrong. It had been hurting all day and then… it happened… I tried so hard to keep him inside but it hurt so–bad and no matter how much I squeezed... When you started massaging me, I knew there was no hope. I felt the last of him slipping out."

He cups my cheek and with the softest voice says, "I know you tried. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry I left you alone even when you kept begging me not to." I collapse onto him, my body in a fetal position against his. Julian embraces me.

"He was the only reason... why we were ok–the only thing making us work–"

"Astoria." He pauses, pulls my chin up so that I'll look at him. "You're right. Without.." Julian clears his throat. "I might have never really seen you… and that's not your fault. It's all on me. I might have never woken up, but I love you. I see you now. I was willing to let you kill me so that you could be happy. Do you understand?"

I don't answer because how can I believe he even knows what love is? Silence settles between us for a while. "Was it… a boy? It felt like a boy. He moved around so much.”

Julian shakes his head and swallows hard. “I couldn’t tell. But. Every baby starts out as a girl. They have the chromosomes of the mother, which are two X’s, and then when the father’s chromosome activates, the second X from the mother stops working. So for a long time, the baby is always a girl. It’s after the fourteenth week that things change. It was our little queen.”

I swallow my tears and stare at the white sheets, but I can feel the tension in his body, and a sadness he'd never shown me before. He actually cared; he hadn’t been pretending.

“Now we learn to trust each other. I trust that you’ll never leave me and you trust that everything I tell you to do, everything Isay to you, is in your best interest.” He pushes my hair back and caresses my cheek while I stare into the heaven that his eyes promise.

The pain of everything this man has done to me comes in a wave and drowns me. I shouldn’t forgive him. It’s sick. But I realize I’m trying so hard not to, that it hurts. “Asher, I…” I swallow deep.

“What? You what?”

“I don’t see how this can work. You’ve hurt mesomuch.”

“Yes, I have. And I cannot predict what I will do if I ever suspect you're trying to run from me again. Astoria, the way I feel about you… The things that go through my mind… at the thought of not having you. It scares me. This can't happen again. I'll always kill anyone who touches you. It can only be me. Are you going to run, pretty bird?" The last two words carry a world of tension as if he is warning me, not asking.

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