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Her words trailed off as she spoke, and my senses were filled with the nightmarish memories of that fateful day – the thick, metallic smell of blood in the air, the sound of gunfire, the terror in the eyes of the men I had come to know as brothers. Never again, I had promised myself that – I would never put myself in a position to let something like that go down again. To get hurt the way I had been there.
"It’s fine," I snapped back at her. My voice was taut, and I felt like a rubber band, pulled so tight I might snap at any moment.
"I’m sorry for bringing it up," she blurted out. "I just...I thought it might do you good, you know, to talk about it a little..."
"It won’t," I shot back, and I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and facing away from her. I could feel her staring at me, likely sensing that she had screwed up in some way, but she had no idea how badly this hurt me.
I tried to forget it. I had tried to let go of what had happened that day. No, beyond that – I had tried to let go of all of it. The way I had been treated when I arrived home again, the way that I had been dismissed and written off as nothing more than a pain in the ass of the government. The people who had trained me, supported me, admired me, told me that they cared about me, they were gone. My parents had died years before, and I had nobody – nothing to believe in, nothing to trust.
The Bratva world had seemed like a fair exchange. At least I knew what kind of life I would be living, working for these kinds of men. This darkness, it had become familiar to me now, and there was nothing I could do to hide from it. Better to just embrace it and accept that it was my fate.
But now, here she was, talking about it. The woman I wanted to protect. The woman I wanted to protect, not just from the outside world, but from the storms that raged inside me, too. She didn’t know what she was dealing with here, she didn’t understand the extent of the damage within me.
She reached out to touch my shoulder and I pulled away at once. She inhaled sharply, able to tell she had screwed up.
"I’m sorry," she blurted out. "I shouldn’t have brought it up, I just thought we could talk about it...maybe you would feel better..."
Slowly, I turned to face her. I felt like something had shifted inside of me, a heavy weight resting on my chest. I met her gaze steadily, not breaking it for a moment.
"I think we should take things back to the way they were before."
"Before?" she whispered, her eyes widening. I nodded.
"Before we had sex," I replied bluntly. "It was a mistake."
She stared at me, and I could see the hurt written all over her face. For a second, I wanted to take those words back – admit that I had only said them because I felt as though we were getting too close, and I was afraid of what she might see in me if I didn’t pull away before she got any nearer.
But, instead, I just stared back at her, as though daring her to argue with me. I had no idea what she was going to say, but I knew I couldn’t deal with this. I couldn’t deal with her talking to me like she knew me, like she accepted this part of me she didn’t even know about. If she knew the darkness I carried in me, she would never have wanted anything to do with me. I was just saving her the trouble.
"A mistake?" she whispered. "How – how can you say that?"
"How can you not see it?" I replied. I was being harsh with her, but it seemed to me the only way I could get this through to her – get her to understand that I wasn’t the man she thought I was, the man she wanted me to be. It made my chest ache, seeing that sadness in her eyes, but what other choice did I have? I had to end this before she tried to inch any closer to me, before she ended up stung in a way she could never recover from.
I turned away from her again. I knew I couldn’t be looking her in the eye when I said this next part.
"You should go," I told her. "This is professional now. We need to keep it that way."
"You really expect me to just be able to go back to the way things were before?” she demanded. "Look at me, Alex!”
I forced myself to turn around and face her. Fuck, it hurt looking her in the eyes like this, but I knew it was for the best.
"Tell me," she ordered me, tears shining in her eyes. "Tell me again. To my face."
"We need to end this," I told her. "I don’t care what you do with Solomon, but this, between us, it’s over. You understand?"
She rose to her feet, wrapping her arms around herself defensively.
"Oh, I understand," she replied, voice quivering. And, with that, she stalked to the door and slammed it loudly behind her – and left me sitting, alone once more, in the silence.
And wondering if I had just managed to fuck things up beyond all repair.
Chapter Nineteen – Olya
I wiped away the tears from my eyes, breathing hard as I stared down at the pregnancy test in front of me.
Because there was no way I could be seeing this right.
It had hit me, earlier in the day, that it had been nearly two months since I’d last had my period – I mean, yeah, could have just been with all the stress and changes in my life recently, not to mention all the traveling I’d been doing, but I got the feeling there was something else going on.
