Page 131 of Inevitable Endings
“Not your face. Not your voice. Just… the feeling of you,” he says, eyes still shut. “That warmth you gave me that I carried in my bones. That unbearable softness. I held onto that like a dying man clutches light in the dark.”
His hands tighten around me, desperate, like he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he loosens his grip.
“I don’t know who I am without the title,” he whispers. “WithoutPakhan.” He spits the word like it’s poison. “That name gave me shape. It told me who to be. What to want. What to destroy.”
“And when it was stripped away… there was nothing left but bone and shadow.”
He pulls back just enough for his eyes, those brilliant, haunted green eyes, to meet mine. They’re glassy, wet, and ancient with pain.
I can’t breathe through the ache in my chest.
“But you,” he says, so quiet it’s almost a thought, “you saw through it. Through all the rot. Through the blood and the bruises and the rage.”
His lip trembles, and I can feel his shame rising again, like smoke from a long-dead fire.
“You looked at me like I was still human,” he chokes out. “Likethere was something left.”
I cup his cheek, thumb tracing the damp line of a tear.
“There is,” I say. “Thereis.You don’t have to be the name, there is someone beyond that.”
He leans into my touch like it’s sunlight after a lifetime of rain.
“I don’t know how to be that person,” he whispers.
The silence that follows is thick, suffocating.
“I only know how to burn things down. How to make people afraid.But when you touch me…” His voice falters. “I feel like you’re touching the man beneath the name, you touch me so deep that it reaches the buried layers.”
His eyes are anything but calm.
“I don’t want to be a ghost,” he says, voice shaking. “I want to matter. Not to the world. Not to the name. To you.I want to be seen by you the way no one’s ever dared to see me.”
My chest twists painfully.
“I want to beyours,” he continues, and there’s a raw violence in the way he says it, like a vow, like a threat to everything that would dare keep us apart. “In a way that doesn’t stain your soul. But I don’t know if that’s possible.”
He swallows hard, and his gaze drops, shame cutting through the intensity.
“I’m not sorry for the blood I’ve spilled,” he says, and there’s no hesitation. “I’d spill it again. I will spill it again. That part of me doesn’t die.”
“But,” he adds, slowly lifting his gaze again, “I am sorry for what I did to you.”
His jaw flexes, and his voice drops to something more guttural, unhinged with emotion.
“I’m The Devil,solnyshko,” he breathes. “But for you, I kneel. For you, I would strip the skin off the world. Burn every city. Drown every name. If it meant you lived in peace at the end of it. If it meant your smile stayed unruined.”
I can’t stop crying, not because I’m afraid, but because there’s something so achingly pure in this twisted, broken man offering the only kind of love he knows how to give. Violent. Unrelenting. Absolute.
“You give me meaning,” he says, voice cracking. “You gave me a reason to come back from Hell. And if all that’s left of me is flame, then I want to be the fire that warms you, not the one that scars.”
I press my forehead to his again, my tears mixing with his, and whisper into the breath between us, “Then be fire, and I’ll be the one who never lets you go dark again.”
And in that moment, he breaks, fully breaks.
Not into pieces.
But into someone new.
