Don’t feel bad he made the choice. He always had the choice.
“Don’t mistake this for forgiveness. I just don’t want a manslaughter charge on top of everything else,” I finally muttered as we reached my floor.
He said nothing.
Once inside, he stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, managing to look both painfully out of place and infuriatingly beautiful. I hated that I noticed how much more he was leaning to one side now, how red his hands were where they gripped the cane, how blue his lips had actually gone. Most of all, I hated how much I still cared.
“Take your coat off and sit,” I said with a sigh, already heading for the kitchen.
I might have been caring, but I was still petty. Instead of making him coffee with the nice beans he brought me, I used the dreadful instant abomination Nora had left in my cupboard that suggested she lacked taste buds and shame.
I wanted him to warm up, not to feel comfortable.
I kept my back to him while I heated the kettle, but I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck the entire time, and it made me jittery in a way I resented. The silence was worse. All I wanted was for him to talk so I could get this over with.
And yet, standing there with my back to him while the kettle worked itself toward boiling, I found myself thinking about indispensability again. About how the Medici had understoodsomething that most never did: the most binding thing you could give a person was not a cage but a need. Pietro had made himself necessary to me in ways I had not noticed. The warmth of him. The steadiness. The specific, maddening precision with which he learned what I was and what I needed and then given me both without being asked. He had made himself indispensable, and then he had left, and the fact that I had stood in the apartment watching him turn blue rather than invite him in was, if I was being completely honest with myself, proved I felt strongly about him, good or bad.
I was still inside it.
The question was what I chose to do about that.
I set the mug down in front of him with a little more force than necessary, and some coffee splashed onto the counter.
“Talk,” I said. “I have a show to watch.”
He looked up at me then, and damn it, the expression in his eyes almost sent me to my knees. There was love there. Devotion.
Be strong, Emily.
“I missed you,” he said quietly.
“Right.”
“I’m sorry. Truly. If I could go back, I would.”
I crossed my arms. “What exactly are you sorry for?”
He looked down at his hands before answering. “Everything. Breaking my promises. Knowing now that I couldn’t keep them the way I wanted to. Wanting to agree to all your rules and then failing you when it mattered. Lying to you. Walking away. Letting it get to the point where you ended up in that warehouse because of me.”
I held his gaze. “Is that what you think I’m angry about?”
He frowned slightly, and there it was again, that terrible sense that for all his brilliance he was still missing the point.
“Emily—”
“No,” I said. “Answer me. Is that what you think this is?”
He let out a breath. “I think I hurt you in every possible way.”
“You did,” I said. “But not for the reason you keep circling around.”
He went still.
“I love you like a madman,” he said, as if that explained anything.
“Love doesn’t change a thing.”
His hand went into his coat pocket, and when he pulled out the small blue box, fury hit me so fast I could barely breathe around it.
