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“Well… she was never formally diagnosed. I just entered her symptoms into an online quiz and the results pointed to paranoid personality disorder.”
“Then how did you know she was really sick?”
“She kept moving us from place to place, running from some imaginary bogeyman. Mom didn’t have the mental bandwidth to concern herself with something as trivial as my art.”
Roman cups my face with both hands, his dark eyes softening. “You’re not alone anymore. You have me, and you have a family.”
My breath slows, and my heart fills with warmth. Roman’s words are full of sincerity, as is his touch. I’ve finally found a man who understands me and accepts me for who I am and doesn’t want me to change. I rest my head on his chest, feeling safe and loved.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks, rubbing circles on my back.
Tilting my head, I gaze into his dark eyes and smile. “That I’m the luckiest woman in the world.”
Roman smiles back, but it’s one of those pained expressions that makes my heart clench.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He inhales a deep breath. “I didn’t bring you to my home for the right reasons.”
I draw back, my brow furrowing. “What do you mean?”
“It was revenge.”
“Huh?”
He glances away and falls silent for several moments, his jaw clenching and releasing as though trying to fathom how to force out an unspeakable truth.
Dread trembles along the lining of my stomach and the fine hairs on the back of my neck rise. It feels like I’m dangling over a precipice, waiting for the ground to crumble beneath my feet. At any moment, I could tumble into an abyss of rejection and despair.
What horrific truth could he be struggling to reveal?
When he sucks in a breath, my entire body tenses like I’ve leaped off that balcony and am hurtling toward certain doom.
“When I saw the man who wanted you was a cop, I took you to spite him,” he says.
“Because of your wrongful imprisonment?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he rasps.
“Okay…” I wait for him to say something devastating, but he continues staring at me as though expecting an explosion. When I realize that’s all there is to his confession, I grab his hand. “You saved me.”
Roman drops his gaze.
I squeeze his hand, making him finally meet my eyes. “Listen to me. That night, Jim would have put me in a cell, raped me, and maybe even let his buddies at the police precinct have their turn. After that, he planned on injecting me with hard drugs so I would die of an overdose.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You fucking saved me, Roman.” I give his hands a shake. “Who was there when Dominic tried to strangle me to death? Who ran after me when that cop wanted to abduct me for Jim?”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Me.”
“Are you still keeping me out of a sense of revenge?”
He smiles. “No.”
“Then stop feeling guilty.” I give him a few swats on the arm to emphasize my point. “You’re my fucking hero and I love you. Do you understand?”
His eyes widen, and his smile vanishes. “What did you say?”
