I feel my face go hot. “How long?”
“A few months.”
I grip the edge of the vanity behind me. “Get out.”
“Katya, please.”
“Get out.”
“You deserve an explanation.”
“No,” I say. “I deserved loyalty. I deserved honesty. I deserved to not be made a fool in my own home.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he says. “We’re going to talk to everyone. Irina already said?—”
A bitter smile pulls at my mouth. “Of course, Irina knows. Her daughter steals my fiancé and somehow, she’s the victim, yes?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“How was it then, Lev?”
His face twists with frustration. “You and I were arranged before we were anything else. You know that.”
“There was family expectation. With Vika it’s different, I fell in love with her.”
I look down at the diamond on my finger. It’s large, tasteful, but also cold. I used to love its weight. I used to turn my hand in the light and feel chosen.
Now it looks like a collar.
I pull it off.
Lev’s face changes. “Katya.”
I hold it out to him.“Take it.”
He shakes his head. “It belongs to you.”
I smile, but there’s no softness left in it. “No. It belongs to whatever lie you told when you gave it to me.”
His nostrils flare. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“That’s what men say when they want forgiveness without consequences.”
He deserves me screaming. He deserves the lamp from my bedside table thrown at his beautiful face. He deserves my nails in his skin and my father’s men dragging him out by the throat.
But I do none of that.
That’s the humiliating part.
I just stand there in my half-packed bedroom, wearing silk sleep shorts and a camisole, with dresses spread over the chair and my passport on the vanity, and I hand back the engagement ring like a woman with manners.
Like a woman who has not just been gutted.
He finally opens his palm.
I drop the ring into it without a single sound.
Lev closes his fingers around it.
