Page 103 of Made in Love and Blood

Salvatore chuckled. “I know you like the white gold, Rina. And gold is better for pink, which you’ve said a thousand times before. I’m going to go with what you’ve taught me. I will always choose what I know you really want just to make you happy. Let’s not pretend differently.”

“No babe, today?” she asked him. “Darling, even?”

He sighed. “I can’t win with you, can I?”

She said nothing.

“It’s fine,” he told her, “I deserve that and more. I do, so let me have it. Just keep throwing it at me all day, every day, and I’ll stand here and fucking take it like I should.”

The two stared one another down for a good while. Neither said a word, their gazes locked with three feet of space between them and whole world of hurt pulsating there like a living, breathing thing.

Then, her Gucci heel hit the floor in a stomp. “You are literally—literally, literally, literally,” she said firmer each time, her palm smacking the top of the marble island to match, “the only man in my life, ever, who can walk up behind me and say boo, and it wouldn’t affect me a bit. Do you know that?”

He blinked. “I—”

“Just you,” she stated, turning on him fully, a tear tracking down her cheek. “You, Salvatore, are the only man I have felt safe with. I have never, not once, thought you would hurt me. In any way. Ever. Not really.”

“We’ve done a lot of hurting between us, Carina. Don’t change history now.”

“What, the fighting? How awful I was to a child that only needed love? The name calling? Or maybe you mean the handful of other men I let fuck me over the years? I bet you none of that, and all of it put together, didn’t hurt either of us the way you hurt me in our kitchen while I stood there pregnant with your baby. Tell me those things hurt you more! Please, tell me.”

He couldn’t.

She nodded, waving at him. “Exactly. And whatever that felt like for you, magnify it by a thousand and stuff it all inside of me along with everything else that’s already killing me here. And I believed our whole marriage that you would never do to me what other people have. I believed it the moment you met me at the end of the alter.”

He rubbed at his cheek, still watching her.

Carina didn’t let up, another tear falling in the meantime. “But didn’t you just do exactly that? In a way, didn’t you just weaponize my trauma against me to hurt me? Like a monster would, Salvatore. You were a fucking mon—”

“I am, and I’m sorry.”

That, at its core, was the truth.

He couldn’t justify it. He would not try to explain the things he said or why he’d said them. Even a possible relapse, which he had been so close to, couldn’t make right how he had treated her. None of it excused his behavior, so he wouldn’t use it to. He simply needed her to know he understood that, and it would never happen again.

“I was wrong, I will always be wrong for saying those things to you,” he said, playing with his wedding band while she cried and tried to hide it with quick swipes of her hands. “I know that, and I’m so sorry. And you will never hear anything like that from me again.”

She cried even harder, openly doing so now, and staring at the crystal chandelier overhead as her hand slapped her jean-covered thigh. “And see, I know you are. You don’t even apologize to God anymore for the things you do. I know you mean it, because between the two of us, we know who does the monstrous things. We know, Sal.”

“Hey, don’t.”

He stepped forward. She put that hand up fast.

“Don’t you dare, please. I just...I can’t. I cannot have you touching me, okay,” she muttered thickly.

Salvatore froze on the spot, and his hand remained outstretched for hers. “I just want to tell you—”

“If you touch me, I’m not going to keep being mad at you. If you tell me that it’s okay and you’re sorry while you’re holding me and look at me the way you always have, then it will be. And it shouldn’t be that fucking easy for you. It’s never that easy for me, is it? Shouldn’t you have to do the same? God knows you made me pay in years sometimes, Sal. There were years when you wouldn’t even touch me. I earned you back every fucking time. You know what I forgot to do over the last few days?”

His hand dropped to his side, trembling. “No, what?”

“Count. I don’t know how many days it’s been, I know it’s only a few more than—”

“Stop.”

He was a monster. Completely.

Her fingers found home clenching into his silk button-down shirt when he rushed her. Fuck all that noise about not touching or holding her, because that wasn’t really what she wanted or needed. Salvatore knew this woman, he loved her. He couldn’t not give her exactly what she was desperately screaming out for: him.