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If only she could remember what had led up to that moment outside. If only she could remember. But it was like her brain had the door firmly shut on it. Like it didn’t want to know.
“I made a new life for myself. Away from you. Away from your rejection. Why did you get to hold her first?” The question came deep from her soul. “Why? Why should you have memories of her birth when I don’t? You didn’t want her.”
And that statement threw the door open on all the memories. “I told you I loved you,” she said. “I wanted to make a life with you. I believed that we could.”
The devastation was raw and real. That dinner. The way that she had hoped and believed. That he had loved her the way that she loved him. And this was just the same. He had lulled her right back into that fantasy. And this time... Oh, this time it had been even more cruel. Because he had made her believe... He had made her believe. Again. What a fool she was. And he was happy to make her one.
He moved toward her, and she jerked back. “Don’t touch me. How dare you. You made love to me with me thinking you... With me thinking I loved you. When we both know I don’t. Not anymore. Not ever. I want to go. I’m leaving. I’m taking Soriya back to England.”
“I’m afraid that is not possible,” he said, his face shadowed in darkness. “You are to stay with me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“And how do you think that will go for you, Riot? I am one of the richest men in the world. You have just sustained a head injury. I have been caring for Soriya all this time... And I cared for you.”
“You rejected her.”
“You ran away and nearly caused yourself to miscarry. I did not chase you out into that storm.”
His words were hard and harsh, and she knew they were a lie. She knew he didn’t even believe this version, and yet she could see him trying to hold it up over himself as a shield now.
This was the Krav she’d forgotten.
The man who used his cruelty to guard any tender places in himself. To push anyone who got too close far, far away.
“Is that what you tell yourself? Your cruelty wasn’t the beast that ran me right out of your villa? I did not miscarry. I went on to make a life, I got a job, I had a home...”
“You have a home with me. You will still be my wife.”
“This changes everything.”
“It changesnothing.”
His words landed, a cruel blade at the center of her chest. “It changes nothing to you if I go from loving you to despising you? It changes nothing if you go from having a wife who stays with you willingly to one who is a prisoner?”
And again, she saw the truth of him. He lifted a shoulder and shrugged. Worse, he stood there naked, as if it bothered him not at all, while she felt increasingly vulnerable, soft and exposed.
How could you go up against a man such as him?
A man who felt nothing.
“I want to leave,” she said.
He took a step toward her, his eyes all black fire. “I don’t care.”
“You would keep her from me?”
“Yes. Because in the end, you won’t go. Not if I keep her. And so, I will have what I want.”
“Why did you do this? Why do you care? You’ve never...” And it was like a light had been shone into all the dark places in this glorious life, this glorious home. No more illusion left at all. “I’ve never even seen you hold her.”
He had made sure she was cared for, but he never touched their daughter.
He never showed love.
And her mind, her heart, her soul, had been so desperate to fashion him into what she’d wanted him to be that she hadn’t seen it, not really.
The blind spots hadn’t come solely from her lack of memory.
