Page 79 of Fragile Oath

She nodded, slowly writing something on her parchment. “The flavors here can be overwhelming.”

“As opposed to the light, inoffensive taste of borscht?” I couldn’t help but tease her.

The corner of her mouth tugged up. “But borscht isn’t so sweet and so rich.”

“No,” I agreed amicably. “Just revolting.”

“You’re revolting,” she muttered, though her smile widened.

“Galina?”

“Yes?”

“Why are we talking about soup?” I had a guess, but I needed to know if she would confirm it. I was exhausted of the way we danced around everything.

She still didn’t look up, though her quill paused again.

“You said I wouldn’t answer, if you asked me things,” she said, her brow furrowing slightly. “The implication being that I don’t trust you.”

Having thought about this extensively, to a frankly maddening degree, I couldn’t find it in myself to argue. Shedidn’ttrust me. Hadn’t, when it mattered, or even when it didn’t.

When I said nothing, her shoulders tightened, but she went on.

“I’ll never be like your family is, like Rowan is, or even Gracie, open and soft—” She took a moment to search for a word. “Expressive.”

“I never wanted nor asked you to be that way,” I said, steel in my tone.

She gave a sharp nod. “But I do trust you. The things that I kept from you were not about you…or at least, they did not feel that way to me at the time. It was just a part of my life I had hoped to leave behind.”

I considered that from her perspective. Stars knew I could relate to wanting to outrun the past. How long had it taken me to talk about Mac? Longer than she had been away from Alexei, for sure.

“I can understand that,” I said honestly.

“I should have seen how impossible that was,” she said ruefully. “But I didn’t want you to see me that way, when you were the only person who had ever thought that I was strong.”

That pulled me up short.

“And you think what happened changed that?” My gaze bored into her, but she didn’t turn.

She swallowed, sitting up straighter. “Obviously.”

I thought back to the day she had come to my rooms in Socair, unyielding, even in the face of her injuries. How she didn’t falter on the road back when we were threatened by rebels, when she was asked to sleep in a suffocating tunnel and ride astride for days on end.

She had stayed on the scene of an attack and treated injuries without hesitation, watched a hanging without looking away.

Then with Alexei… I may have been angry when I understood what she had done – and hell, I still was, but even then, she had remained steadfast and unflinching for days on end in the face of a man who she couldn’t hope to physically overpower.

I could fault her decisions and her honesty, and yes, sometimes her pride, but I could never fault her strength.

“Galina.” I said her name with a trace of exasperation. “I have thought you were many things over the course of the past few months, but weak was never one of them.”

She met my eyes, a rare sheen of tears sparkling in her own.

“I was, though.” Her voice was carefully controlled. “Not just with him, but with you. You were right. If you had asked me those questions, I would have lied. That is the life I was brought up in, the person I was expected to be. Alex–” She stopped before saying the bastard’s name. “He would have wanted me to lie, to be whatever version of me fit into the idea he already had in his head. But that’s not who I want to be with you.”

I was frozen, torn between a rekindled fury at Alexei and another, more fragile emotion I couldn’t quite name, something between sorrow for the place that she had been, and hope for the things she was saying now. Though both emotions were laced with caution because stars if we hadn’t been close to here before.

“I never wanted you to be anything other than you are,” I said after a moment. “I just wanted honesty.”

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