Page 129 of Only for Him
"I'd never felt anything like it before. Like the world made sense when she looked at me."
I was young, with Anastasia. The feelings she brought out in me—they were real, but they weren’t true. What I felt for her wasa prism of everything I wanted a girl to be, projected, bent and scattered until it looked like salvation.
Giselle's hand slides to my shoulder, grounding me.
She’s not an illusion. She’s real.
She doesn’t make the world brighter. She makes it burn.
What I felt for Anastasia was a boy’s delusion in a borrowed suit.
What I feel for Giselle is reality carved open and offered to me, bleeding.
"I courted her properly. Brought her chocolates. Took her to dinner. Never told her what I really did. She thought I worked security." I laugh again, hollow. "And for a while, it was good. The only good thing in my life."
"What happened?" Giselle asks, her voice gentle but insistent.
"Pavel Starkov happened," I say, and the name is acid on my tongue. "Timofey's oldest son. He saw her with me one night, and he wanted her.”
The rage still burns, even now, a light that never goes out.
“He wanted her because she was mine."
I expect Giselle to react negatively. I know she’s jealous of Rosa, so why wouldn’t she be jealous of Anastasia?
But she doesn’t.
Maybe because she already knows how the story ends.
Just like I’ve always known her story begins, even if I didn’t know the details.
It’s all one story. We’re one soul, split between two bodies, fated as constellations to chase each other until the sky collapses and we collide.
“Pavel was jealous,” I say, the words scraping out of me like gravel. “Of how his father looked at me. Like I was the son he wished he’d had. I earned that place. Pavel was born into it, but Iearnedit.”
I pause. The rage is there, same as always—a slow, patient fire at the center of my bones.
“He waited until I was settled. Until Anastasia and I had nearly a year together. Then he crawled to his father with a story about how I’d been skimming money. Stealing from the Bratva.”
Giselle's eyes narrow. "And Timofey believed him."
"Blood is blood. And Pavel was Timofey’s son." My jaw is so tight it hurts. The pain is an echo and I welcome it. "They beat me. Interrogated me for three days. Then Timofey sent me to a prison he owned in Chechnya."
Her fingers drift to my stomach, to the image of Madonna and Child etched into my skin. "And this?"
"Life sentence," I say. "No parole."
She pulls back slightly, and I see the calculation in her eyes. "But you got out."
"Eventually." I turn to face her again. "But not before the worst part."
She waits, ready to share the poison that made me.
"Anastasia stayed loyal to me. She wrote letters. Tried to visit. Told everyone who would listen that I was innocent."
I have to force the words out now, each one cutting my throat on the way.
"Pavel couldn't stand it. That she chose a prisoner, a nobody, over him."
