Page 90 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“Is that what you do?” she asks, her voice thin, shocked.
I sit down on the floor, rest my forearm over my knee. I feel dizzy. Disoriented. Perhaps it’s a lack of sleep. Perhaps it’s something more. And then suddenly all these pieces come back to me in fragments.
Layer upon layer of truth. So many truths that I didn’t want to again.
The truth about me. About where I come from and who I am. About how I idolize my father. About…
“I killed my father,” I say. Even now as I’m horrified by the images washing through me, I feel no pity. No remorse. He was a terrible man. He was a terrible man who was about to harm or potentially kill a child and he needed to be stopped, but I’m not certain that’s why I killed him.
Revenge.
He killed my mother.
Yes. All of this is true. All of it. But still, I was not fueled by a sense of justice, not then. I was fueled by the thing my father taught me to obey. The drive to win. The drive to succeed. To be the baddest, the cruelest, the most powerful possible monster.
It was what he trained me to be, and in the end, I dispatched him when he proved to be a liability. His actions caused great and terrible destruction…
He was threatening the son of one of the men in our village. Our home.
And I stopped him from harming that boy.
My father did bad things in our village, but I never did. I thought it should be our duty to care for those people, not terrorize them.
It’s the closest thing to the Mafia a place like ours would’ve seen. It supports most of the town. Everyone worked for my father. But he also enforced that. His was a reign of terror, and I began to believe that it wasn’t the most efficient way to run a business, or anything else.
He went too far, trying to kill a child in the village. There was no more putting up with it. There could be no more looking the other way.
It had to be stopped. He had to be stopped.
And then, following, they worked for me.
I don’t realize that I’ve said all this out loud until I look and see her face. Leached of color, completely horrified.
“Dragos. You said an assassin killed him…”
“I was the assassin. I had to be. There is nothing good about my family. Nothing good about my father. Nothing good about us, about the way we did business. Nothing. And there is nothing good about the way I do it either. I have taken over the helm of a doomed ship. It is rotten to its core, as is its captain.”
“Dragos… Please. That can’t be true.”
“Of course it’s true. Why you think you know nothing about me? Why do you think that we were married and I kept everything from you? Because I thought… Dammit, Cassandra, I thought that if you could just see me, if I was all you knew, then you would not leave me. I thought that you would remain untouched by it. I thought that…”
“You brought me into this world, and you didn’t even ask me if I wanted it.”
“I know.”
“You… No wonder you were so afraid for my safety. You live in a world of monsters.”
“I know. And I knew that if you knew this truth you would not want me. So I could never let you know. I have never cared for my life or my death but when I saw you for the first time I suddenly had a reason to live, and a very clear understanding that I would die without you. It was the most painful paradox one can experience. Life in my estimation is short and brutal, and I never wanted to extend it until that moment.”
“You’re trying to tell me that you fell in love with me at first sight, and because of that you had to manipulate me. You had to bring me into the space where I could be killed.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew you had to lie to me, because I wouldn’t go with you if I knew this.”
I step forward, and I put my hand on her face. “Is that true?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
