Page 95 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“You did your time. You had your father.”
“That is possibly true enough. Either way, I’m finishing it. It ends with me,” he says.
“Then… Then I’ll stay. Then we can try to… To be married. To give this a chance.”
“Only a chance?”
The way he says that makes my heart feel broken. “Dragos, I was married to you for four years. You couldn’t give me what I wanted, and I was dying a slow painful death. I know you want to fix it now. But who knows if we can do this. As… Functional human beings. And I want more for us. Neither thing that I did with you was right. When I didn’t get exactly what I wanted I left. I ran from you. And before that I just let myself get swept along in the current. I don’t want either of those things now. I want for the two of us to be able to talk. And I’m just getting to know you.”
“You want me to date you?”
“Yes.”
It seems an absurd thing. To ask my husband, the criminal, if you would like to date me. To try and start all of this over again. To try and find a way forward.
“We can’t just do the same things. We can’t just go right back to doing the same dance, because we know it doesn’t end well.”
“All right,” he says. “I will give you whatever you need. And I’m going to call my contact at Interpol tonight, and as soon as there isn’t any danger, we can go back home.”
I don’t know what home is going to look like for us. There are so many truths laid bare, and everything feels different, and yet somehow the same. I feel like I’m floating in a surreal environment. I feel like I actually know what has just happened to me. To him. To us.
And I feel like until we have time, none of it will make any sense. We have so much to comb through. But the one thing that I’m certain of is my feelings for him. I know that they’re real. The question is are they compatible with life?
That’s the one thing I think neither of us really know at this point.
“I have some work to do,” he says, standing up. But this time it doesn’t feel like abandonment. This time I know exactly why he’s leaving.
He’s doing this for us. He has been acting for us all this time. And that revelation is something that’s also going to take me a long time to fully understand.
I sleep for a while, and when I wake up it’s to Dragos’s hand on my back. “Cassandra, my love, we can go now.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dragos
IWALK INTOmy own house feeling like a stranger to myself. Because while I am the same man who left this house in a rage, a fury of fear and anger, looking for his wife who ran away to Paris, I am also something entirely different. Something is changed in me fundamentally. Because even when I was on the verge of dismantling my father’s crime empire, I wasn’t doing it for the greater good. Or for good at all.
This is something I finally speak out loud to Cassandra as we take dinner on the same terrace where we had dinner the night she left me.
I’ve cooked for her again, in hopes that I can redeem that last time together, when I fundamentally destroyed everything.
“I wasn’t aiming for a redemption arc when I decided to turn everything and everyone over to the authorities, not with the broader world. I wantedyou. I wanted to be someone you could…talk to. I wanted to be someone you were safe with. And it was becoming clear to me that it was going to be difficult for me to keep you if I was having to oppose my father’s enemies at the same time.”
“His enemies? I thought they were all part of the same organization.”
“It’s a difficult balance. There is a constant threat of betrayal, backstabbing. Everyone is on guard always. How can you trust the person you’re forming an alliance with when they’re all murderers and thieves?”
“Isn’t there a pirate code, or something?”
“Only in the movies.”
“It sounds like ungentlemanly warfare.”
“It is. But I have never claimed to be a gentleman.”
She’s silent for a long moment. “If you were really doing all this for me, then why did you say those things to me that night before I left?”
I have to sit there and try to remember. I have to dig through all the detritus in my mind, trying to make sense of what exactly did happen. Why I said those things. Because she’s not wrong. If keeping her was the most important thing to me, why would I say that? Why, when she bore her soul to me, did I say that she was nothing? A mere waitress. Beneath me. When I was in the process of moving heaven and earth for her?
