Page 137 of His Forced Bride
The way she'd smile and tell me she felt better even as the treatments made her violently ill.
The night she stopped pretending and asked me to hold her while she cried.
"She made me promise not to become a monster after she was gone," I continue. "She was afraid the grief would turn me into something she wouldn't recognize."
"Did it?"
I consider the question honestly.
"For a while, yes. I became colder, more ruthless. I stopped caring about collateral damage, stopped seeing the people I hurtas human beings with their own lives and families. It was easier to feel nothing than to risk that level of pain again."
"When did that change?"
"It hasn't. Not completely."
I meet her eyes. "Until recently."
Understanding dawns in her expression, and I see the moment she realizes what I'm admitting.
That she's brought something back to life in me that I thought died with Yelena.
That caring about her survival has awakened emotions I've spent years suppressing.
"Yuri…"
"I'm not asking for anything," I say quickly.
"I'm just explaining why I understand what you're going through. The questioning, the self-doubt, the fear that you'll never be able to trust your own judgment again… I've been there."
She sets down her glass and moves to straddle me on the couch, her hand finding mine.
"How did you get through it?"
"Time. Work. Focusing on things I could control instead of things I couldn't."
I turn my hand palm up, letting her fingers intertwine with mine.
"And eventually, accepting that some people are worth the risk of caring about them."
"Even if they might leave you?"
"Even then."
For a moment, silence controls the room, her hand warm in mine while the vodka works through our systems.
We exist in a bubble of honesty that feels dangerous but necessary.
I have to trust her or there is no point in attempting a relationship, and over the past month while I've been scrambling to keep Inessa safe, honor my promise to her father, and in a roundabout way, find Semyon and Dominic's killer, something has shifted in me.
I want this with her.
As wrong as it sounds, as confronting as it may be to anyone who sees a man my age in love with a woman so young… but I want her.
"I'm scared," she admits.
"Of what?"
"Of everything. Of my mother, of what we're planning to do to her, of how I feel about you, of whom I'm becoming."
