His detachment dwindled—he couldn’t seem to hold on to it—and soon soothing Russian endearments spilled from his lips. With zero hesitation, he saw to every inch of my body, inside and out, even my bottom.

I would be sore tomorrow, but he hadn’t hurt me. At least, not physically. My eyes pricked with tears.

Once he’d finished with me, he turned to soaping his own body, giving himself a cursory rubdown.

Tears kept forming. I didn’t cry often; God knew I was an ugly crier. I squeezed my eyes shut, resenting every drop that escaped, cursing the tremble in my bottom lip.

“Natalie?” His tone aghast, he demanded, “What is this?” He grasped my cheeks, lifting my face. “Why are you crying?”

I opened my eyes but said nothing. Let him see how it feels.

“I’ve . . . hurt you?” He looked furious with himself, releasing me to ball his fists. “It was too much.”

Tears continued to spill.

“Ah, God, milaya.” He dragged me against his chest, coiling his arm around my nape. Locking me against him, he launched his other fist against the marble. Again and again.

Trapped like this, I could do nothing but wait. Nothing but feel . . .

His muscles moving against me. His chest shuddering with breaths.

I sensed his need to punish, to deliver pain. And for the first time, I realized that the invisible enemy he wanted to strike . . . was himself.

I whispered, “Stop, Sevastyan.”

To my amazement, he did. “I would rather die than hurt you like this.”

I believed him. “I’m not h-hurt.” Tears continued to spill, belying my words. “You didn’t hurt my body.”

“Then I scared you. I’ve made you cry. Tell me how to fix this, and I’ll do it. Anything except letting you go. That I can never do.”

“No, you won’t fix this. You had chances to, but nothing has changed.” I pushed away from him. “Just leave me alone.”

Of course he wouldn’t. He took my wrist, drawing me out of the shower. Reaching for a towel, he began drying off my shoulders and arms, my belly. He knelt, rubbing my legs as if I was the most precious thing in the world. With a kiss against my hip, he said, “It’s been decades since I’ve felt shame like this.”

Shame is more painful than blows. That only made me cry harder.

He rested his forehead against my belly. “You are gutting me, love. You want to leave—you have reason to—but I can’t let you go any more than I can quit breathing.”

Now what was I going to do? Nothing has changed.

I twisted from him, then grabbed my robe, donning it on my way out of the bathroom. I was heading for my closet when he took my hands and gently urged me toward the bed. As he drew back the cover for me, my shoulders slumped with exhaustion.

Maybe I should take a breather for a minute or two. I didn’t remember eating today, and all the emotions I’d experienced over the last several hours had drained me.

What he’d done to me had drained me.

Yet when I acquiesced and climbed into the bed, I felt like a failure, crying even harder.

He drew his pants back on—to be less threatening to me?—then paced at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know what to do with this.” Back and forth, he paced. “I have no idea what to do, Natalie. I need you to help me figure this out.”

He moved to sit next to me, but my watery glare stopped him. He backed up to sit on the end of the bed. “Talk to me.”

“That’s all we ever do. I talk to you. I’m laid bare. You go unscathed, sharing nothing of yourself. Do you know how messed up it is that I didn’t know you have a living family?”

“I should have told you. I see that now.”

“Too little, too late. You expect us to be in this relationship, but we’re not—”

“Yes, we are.”

“Then you don’t know the meaning of the word. If we’d started as a normal couple—regular girl meets regular guy—maybe things could have been different. We would have gotten to know each other, revealing details of our lives on an equal playing field. But it wasn’t like that. You knew everything about me, and I knew nothing about you. Nothing except lies. Our dynamic was ruined from day one.”

His breaths shallowed. “You’re talking like this is done, over beyond salvaging.”

I sobbed, “Because—it—is!”

He swiped his palm over his haggard face. I’d never seen him so shaken. Not even when Paxán died in front of us. “I . . . don’t accept that.”

“I thought that if I gave you my trust, you’d return it. But you won’t. You never will.”

“What if I did? Could I fix this?”

“No. Because if this is what I have to go through to get a crumb of information out of you, I’ll pass. It’s too exhausting! Besides, you warned me of this. You told me point-blank that I expected too much from you. You told me earlier today that trust might never come for us, and that you couldn’t give me things I needed. I’m such an idiot. I know better than this. I know that when a man tells you he’s no good for you, then you listen to him.”

Stupid, Nat, falling in love with an emotionally unavailable man.

When my tears quickened, Sevastyan looked like I’d slapped him. Which just made me madder. There were emotions inside of him—he wasn’t deadened—he’d just decided to keep them from me at all costs.