Page 85 of Hunted to the Altar
“Because power is the only thing I ever used to keep you. And now I have to give it up to prove I don’t need it to love you.”
He knelt beside me then, not dramatically, not for effect. Just lowered himself like his body couldn’t hold the weight anymore.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about the night I hurt you,” he whispered. “If I could, I would walk away from it all, but that won’t keep you safe. So, I’ll change–foryou.I want you to knowI’m seeing someone. One of Dr. Mya’s therapist friend’s since apparently it’s a conflict of interest for her to see me. Twice a week. No excuses.”
I didn’t look at Mya, but I saw the shift in her out of the corner of my eye.
“You’re doing all this for me?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m doing this because I want to be the kind of man who deserves you. Even if I never get you back.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was sacred.
I stared down at the envelope. My fingers brushed the corner. I felt the pulse in my wrists quicken, the old instincts telling me to pull away, to retreat, to protect.
But I didn’t.
Mya stood up and came to my side.
“You don’t have to forgive him,” she murmured, so low only I could hear. “You don’t have to do anything except what feels right to you.”
I nodded, but my heart was a war drum inside my chest.
Samuel was still kneeling. Still silent. Still waiting. His hands were flat against the floor now, shoulders caved inward like he’d finally collapsed under the weight of his own guilt. The man who once towered over me now looked like he could barely breathe in my presence.
“I opened the envelope.”
He flinched when I said it aloud. Like hearing me speak at all was both a mercy and a punishment.
“Everything is here. Signed. Dated. Notarized.” My voice was quiet. “You really gave it all away.”
“I did,” he said, his voice raw. “I thought it would hurt. But the only thing that hurts is knowing I still don’t deserve to be this close to you.”
I looked down at him. At the hollow version of a man who once ruled rooms with a glance. He was trembling now, jaw clenched, eyes glassy but unblinking.
“I came into your life like a storm,” he said, finally lifting his head. “I told myself I was saving you, but all I did was replace one cage with another. I confused obsession for love. Dominance for protection. I tried to brand you with my name, like it meant you were safe, when really I was just erasing your own.”
“Why are you saying this now?” I asked, my fingers tightening around the envelope. “Why now, after everything?”
“Because you still have the power to destroy me,” he said. “And if that’s what you need, I’ll let you. If you need to hate me, I’ll take every ounce of it. But if there’s anything left—if there’s one breath in your body that doesn’t flinch when I speak—then I’m begging you. Not to forgive me. Not yet. But to stay my wife.”
He bowed fully now, forehead pressing to the floor like a man on an altar, like I was the saint and the executioner all at once.
“I love you,” he whispered into the tile. “In the quiet. In the pain. In the undoing. And I will spend every breath I have left trying to be worthy of that name again. Your husband.”
Silence filled the space between us, thick and sharp. Mya didn’t move. She stood still like the walls were watching, like even the house held its breath.
I didn’t know what part of me cracked first. Maybe it was the way his hands stayed splayed on the floor like he’d lay there forever if I didn’t speak. Maybe it was the voice in my chest that said, just once, that survival didn’t have to mean solitude.
I dropped the envelope to the table beside me. Rolled forward.
“Lift your head,” I said.
He did. Slowly. Carefully. Like I might break him with a word.
“Tell me one more time.”
“I love you,” he said, broken and bare.
