Page 77 of Savage Love

He turns towards me instantly. “You’re awake.” There’s relief in his voice. “I was going to give you about another six hours, and then I was calling the doctor. You slept like the—” he clears his throat. “You barely moved. You slept harder than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m awake now,” I croak, sitting up slowly. “I need to pee, and I need a shower.”

“I can help with the second if—”

I shake my head slowly, smiling at his attempt at a joke. “Just give me a minute, okay? I’ll yell for you if I think I need help.”

I feel like the walking dead. After two days of sleep, I desperately need to feel clean, and I want to do that on my own. I stumble to the bathroom, and once I’m under the hot water, I start to feel a little like a human again.

Which is good, because there’s something else I need, too.

I wrap the towel around myself as I come out of the shower, leaving my hair dark and wet down my back. I see the way Levin looks at me as I step out of the bathroom, the heat in his eyes, and the way he restrains it. A shiver of disappointment goes through me, because if there was one good thing I had hoped might come out of all of this, it was that Levin might realize that he loves me after all. That he might realize that we’re wasting precious time in this stalemate of a marriage.

Of course, I also knew that it could be the opposite. That it might reinforce his fear of loss all over again, especially with the lengths that Diego went to in order to play out the tableau of his first wife’s death. And seeing the way he struggles with the desire that flickers over his face, I have a sinking feeling that it’s the latter.

Slowly, I approach the bed. I crawl onto it, holding the towel close to my chest, and meet Levin’s gaze.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asks quietly. “You don’t have to, if you’re not ready. Niall and Isabella have filled me in on a lot of the details. But—I’d like to hear it from you. If you’re ready.”

Am I? I’m not sure. I’d like to never relive that period of time again. But I don’t want what Levin knows of what happened to all be from others. So slowly, very slowly, I tell him what happened.

I tell him about how Isabella sent the guards to get the car and how we thought we’d be safe. I tell him not to blame her, that I’d been just as sure that nothing would happen. I tell him about Hugo and Jorge, about Diego hitting me, about him shooting Hugo in front of us. I tell him how Diego outlined the plan. And I tell him that I believed he would come for me.

Because it’s true. I hadn’t been sure if it would work—if he could pull it off, or if Diego had at last engineered a plan that even Levin couldn’t beat…a hand of poker he couldn’t win. I don’t say that, because I know what Levin needs to hear, theonlything he needs to hear, is that I believe in him.

And I did. Ido.

“As soon as I saw you come through that door, I knew I was saved.” I move closer to him on the bed, leaning forward to touch his face. “I knew you would get us out of there.”

“That makes one of us.” Levin catches my hand in his, folding his fingers around it. “Elena, I—”

“You don’t need to say anything.” My heart races in my chest. I’m not sure Iwanthim to say anything. I don’t want to hear how this has broken him all over again, how it’s reminded him how easily he can lose what he loves, how it’s reinforced the walls around his heart, barbed wire atop hard stone. I can’t bear to hear it just yet. But looking at his face, I don’t think I’ll have a choice.

“I know,” Levin says quietly. “But Ineedto say this, Elena. I need you to know.”

He wraps his hand around mine, bringing it away from his face and clutching it in his lap, his other hand covering both of ours. “I could have lost you, Elena. I’m grateful you believed in me—but the truth is, it could have so easily gone another way. It could have—” He breaks off, clearly unable to follow that thought to its conclusion. I can see that he’s struggling with how close he came to losing me. How horribly this all could have ended.

“It’s alright.” I clutch my hand around his, looking at him gently. “It didn’t end that way. We’re home, and we’re safe. Diego is dead. Our baby is fine. It didn’t play out the way it did before, Levin. I’m safe.We’resafe.” I repeat it, wanting him to understand. Wanting him to know that there’s nothing to fear. That we can start to try to put the past behind us, if only he—

To my shock, I see his blue eyes start to mist over with tears. “Elena—” my name comes out choked, sticking in his throat. “Fuck. I meant to say all this to you when I got back. And then I found out that you—”

He sucks in a deep breath, steadying himself, clinging to me as if I’m a life raft and he’s adrift. “I talked to Viktor, in New York. I didn’t mean to have the conversation that we did, but he—well, he kind of forced me into it.” He gives a small, dry chuckle.

“What was it about?” I ask carefully.

“He talked to me about you. About Lidiya. About the past and how I’ve clung to it.” Levin takes another deep and shaky breath. “He’s not the first to try to get through to me in that way. Max and Liam tried, too, the night I came home to find you bleeding. We might have had this conversation sooner, if not for that. It scared the living hell out of me, Elena. All I could see was being helpless again, losing our child, maybe even losing you, and there being nothing I could do to stop it. I felt that way this time, too, with Diego. That history was repeating itself. And it would be so easy to shut myself off, to hide away in my grief and fear. But I—”

I feel the tiniest sliver of hope. I’m afraid to cling to it, just yet. I’m afraid that I might let myself believe in something that will never happen. But I listen, and I have that small spark of hope.

“Viktor lost his first wife, too,” Levin says slowly. “It was different—she took her own life. Their marriage was different by then, too—it was fraught, difficult. They weren’t in love the way they had been. But he found her in their bathtub. And he found out she was pregnant. There were—similarities.”

“Oh my god,” I whisper. “I had no idea. That’s awful.”

Levin nods, swallowing hard. “He told me a lot of things. The one that stuck out the most was that by clinging to the idea all of these years that I could have made Lidiya’s choice for her, that I could have pushed her away and therefore given her a long life and happiness, takes away her agency in all of it. It diminishes her love for me, by pretending that she couldn’t make that choice for herself, knowing as well as she did how dangerous the life I lived was. It took Viktor talking to me to make me see it, to hear it from his perspective, knowing what he’s lost too—and how he’s found happiness again.”

As Levin speaks, I feel that spark of hope catch. I feel it flicker. And I wonder—

“I left that conversation wanting to come home and tell you that I wanted to try. To give this a chance. Only to almost lose you and our baby, in such a similar—”

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