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“I can start making things really ugly if you don’t start treating me with some fucking respect. Is that what you want, Mikhail? Do you want me to hate you? Do you really think holding on to my keys is going to stop me if I really make my mind up? Think about it. What’s stopping me from blowing the cover on all this bullshit right now, huh? Unless you were thinking of trying to stop me from doing that too. What would you do? Kill me to stop me from going to the cops?” I taunt him. “Lock me up in the basement, with all those guns? I tell you what, give it your best shot. Love or no love, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” I wiggle my fingers at him and he looks flabbergasted as he slowly begins to hand the keys over.
“Kill you? Is that what you think of me?” he asks.
I snatch the keys from his hand. “At this point Mikhail, I don’t know what to think of you. I don’t even think I know who the fuck you are anymore.” I turn away from him.
“Well, I’m not that. I’m sorry that you would even compare me to the people who tried to own you before. I’d never hold you hostage,” he says, genuinely believing himself.
“You know, Mikhail. Sometimes I think you’re truly braindead. What would you call all your antics over the last couple of days? Are you blind to your actions?” I say, opening my car door.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Honestly, I don’t know but as far away from you as I can get,” I say, feeling the weight of those words on my back but I mean them because I don’t see any other way at the moment. There’s no reason to remain living with him. Not if I want to keep my sanity.
“Wait!” He stalls me as I put my foot in my car. I take it back out and turn to face him. “I know I overreacted but can you blame me for trying to protect us? I mean, come on, Julissa,” he says bringing his tone to whisper. “I caught you, on this man’s property with a gun, pointing toward him before I came to grab you. How am I supposed to be able to trust you?”
“I could stand here forever and tell you that yes, at one point, I did think about killing him as I stood there, but I thought better of it and decided that I wouldn’t. I could keep repeating myself and letting you know why I didn’t. I could keep explaining myself to you until my throat goes dry. I could tell you why ‘that man’,” I say with air quotes, “affects me the way he does. I could try to convince you that he’s my father but I can’t force you to believe me. I can’t force you to trust me. And I’m becoming less and less interested in trying so ultimately, the decision to trust or not to trust me is up to you. I need a break,” I tell him.
“Please, Julissa. I’m sorry,” he says.
I interrupt him. “I’m sure you are. You were sorry earlier this morning, remember? You were sorry before that. Yet, here we are. I’m not going to keep doing this with you, Mikhail. Something’s gonna have to change or I’m walking away from you. I might not go as far as to blow the whole thing to shit for the sake of Calder and Axel. But while I may still see both of them, I might just decide to do so in ways that prevent me from running into you. Because if this is the new you, if becoming “Noah” turned your ass into this, I don’t think I can be with you. Not if you’re like this.”
“No, please don’t say that.” He moves forward to hold me but I put a hand in between him and me. He looks shattered and I feel the way he looks but I’ve got to be strong and take a stand for myself. “Please stay,” he begs.
I shake my head. “Not when you’re like this.” Tears sting my eyes as I turn away again.
“I’ll work on it. I will. Please come home,” he says softly.
“All I’ve heard in the last couple of days are empty promises from your mouth. I don’t need another one,” I say to end the conversation and get away quickly before I break down crying.
“I guess I can’t stop you and you do have the freedom to go but I wish you wouldn’t go. I wish you wouldn’t give up on us,” he moans.
“I didn’t say I was, not yet, anyway. I just…” I’m interrupted.
“Just tell me what I can do, please,” he says, giving in to holding me by the shoulders, not with force but with affection.
“I’ve told you. Change. Stop trying to control me. Stop treating me like an idiot. If I tell you the man’s my father, stop doubting me and trying to make out as if I’m insane. In fact, I’ll prove to you right now that I’m not. What’s his name?”
“What?” He shakes his head as if confused.
“When he came to drop off his car, what did he say his name was?” I ask again.
He releases me and scrunches up his face as if he’s trying to remember.
Chapter 16
Mikhail
Ohno.Thisisnot what I expected to happen. I didn’t expect her to flat-out decide to leave. But I mean, she’s right. I have become a monster. I can’t believe she compared me to her traffickers. Is that what I’m like? Oh no. I have to fix that immediately. I’m not ready to lose her.
Of course, she wants to leave, you damn jackass. Who wouldn’t? With the way, you’re treating her?I think to myself.I guess I was so focused on keeping everything together I didn’t realize that given the choice, either of us could walk away. And while the rest of us are afraid of being discovered, I know Julissa is telling me the truth when she says she doesn’t give a fuck. She’s been prepared to die if she must from day one and continue with her mission if she didn’t die.
I’ve been so caught up in fear that I forgot to love her. And now I may lose her. And I don’t want that. And shit, she’s right. It’s up to me if I trust her because whether I do or not, it won’t change the fact that she is free to do whatever the fuck she wants and the only reason she’s sticking around is that she’s choosing to. Not because she’s obligated.
So maybe I do need to give her the benefit of the doubt. Let her prove to me that this man is her father, after all, so I can silence these doubts in my head, doubts that I hate having because it’s led to this. But doubts that I can’t control. I’m closing my eyes, trying hard to visualize the paper I filled out for the man’s car, trying to remember the color of the ink on the page and force my mind to recall his name. “I don’t remember,” I say eventually.
I was too busy selfishly thinking about how we were interrupted, wanting to hurry the process up so that we could pick up where we left off, not taking the care to consider how truly shaken up she was to pay any attention to his damned name. How truly disturbing is that? Damn it. If I had just asked her to stay then, be more willing to have her open up to me than to dismiss her with the thought of getting into her pants straight after, maybe we would’ve been able to clear this up, then and there.
“That’s okay,” she says. “Maybe if he used a fake name, that wouldn’t have helped anyway.”
