Page 76 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
“Yes.” I held that. “I did.” I turned toward her slightly. “Sofia. I did that because I was hurt and because I had the precise knowledge of how to make it land, and I used it. I told you it was discipline. It was retaliation dressed in the language of principle.”
She looked at me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you told me the truth when I asked for it. Because the least I can give you in return is the same.” I held her gaze. “I am not good at being hurt. I have had thirty years of practice at not being in situations where hurt was possible, and you found—without trying—the exact gap in the architecture, and when you used it, I responded the way I respond to threats. Which you were not.”
“I was a little bit,” she said.
“You were,” I acknowledged. “And also something else. Simultaneously. I handled one without accounting for the other.”
She looked at the city below for a moment.
Then she turned to look at me.
“I want to ask you something,” she said.
“Ask.”
“If the war was over, if Cruz was neutralized and the documentation was gone and none of this had ever happened,” she held my gaze, “would you have let me go? After theconfrontation. If there was no operational reason to keep me in the penthouse, no protection to justify proximity. Would you have… ” she stopped. “Would you have let the marriage be what it was, on paper, and let me go?”
I looked at her and did not look away.
“No,” I said.
She held the answer in her expression for a moment.
“No,” I said again, making it plain. “The operation would have ended, but I would not have let you go. Not without standing in front of you and asking the question I am about to ask you. Without the operation, without the protection, without the structure of the marriage as a functional instrument. Just the question.”
“Question?” she inquired, her eyes squinting in confusion.
I looked at her face, at the dark eyes that had been looking at difficult things directly since the first night in a corridor. At the woman who had told me she would rather burn than belong and had stayed anyway, and whose staying I had finally stopped taking for granted.
“Will you stay?” I asked. “Not because the operation requires it. Not because the protection is contingent on it. Not because leaving has costs that staying avoids.” I held her gaze. “Stay because you choose it. Or go—cleanly, completely, with everything you need and nothing owed. The choice is yours, and I will not build a structure around whichever direction it goes.” I paused. “I have spent this entire situation building structures around your choices. I am done building structures.” A breath. “What do you want, Sofia? Not what the situation requires.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she reached out and took my hand. She took my hand the way you take something you have decided you are going to hold. Her fingers between mine, her thumb against the inside of my wrist.
“I want to stay,” she said. “I want—” she stopped, and the stopping was the finding-the-true-version stop, the one I had learned to recognize as the precursor to something she was going to say exactly right. “I want to learn what this is when it isn’t a trap or a war or a cage or a crisis. I want to see what we are when what we are isn’t contingent on anything external.” She looked at me. “I don’t know if we’re good at that. I suspect we’re going to argue a significant amount.”
“Yes,” I said, a chuckle leaving my lips without permission.
“I suspect you are going to attempt to manage things you should ask about instead.”
“Probably.”
“And I am going to push back in ways that are occasionally disproportionate to what actually requires pushing back on.”
“I expect so.”
She looked at our joined hands. “I want to try anyway,” she said. “Not because I’m owned. Not because the exit is blocked. Because you stood in a room at the Monarch Club and you told me I wasn’t alone in it, and, ” she looked up at me, “it is what I have been building the wrong version of for four years. I want the real version.” She held my gaze. “I want it to be you.”
I looked at her.
The thing in my chest—the thing that had arrived before the first time I kissed her, whether I acknowledged it or not, the thing I had called by every name except the accurate one—settled into its actual shape with a finality that has been resisted long enough that the resistance has become more effort than the acknowledgment.
I loved her.
I did not know how to love gently. I had said it to Sergei, obliquely, in the early weeks, in the language of operational caution, and what I had meant was this: I did not have a template for it.
