Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 94678 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94678 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
“It is—”
I grip the glass fragment, and it digs into my palm when I interrupt. “Then come clean! Tell the truth. Admit that you broke my heart!”
Her wet eyes drink in the droplets of crimson dripping from my palm before she shouts, “Yes! Okay! I will admit it. I broke your heart.” Her chest rises and falls as she takes a deep breath, her expression unreadable. “I hurt you, and I’m sorry for that. But doing this…”—she jerks her hand at the shard of glass—“and acting this way won’t fix anything. It won’t take back what I did or how I hurt you. It will only hurt you more.”
Her confession adds more sways to my steps than the alcohol coursing through my veins. I stumble toward the bed and sit on the edge, where I stare at her, unable to comprehend what I’m hearing but grateful she has finally admitted her part in our downfall.
After a beat, I try to mask the vulnerability her words stirred in me. “Saying you’re sorry won’t make everything right.”
“No, it won’t,” Emerson agrees, her eyes never leaving mine. “But hopefully it is a step in the right direction, and it will prove to you that I’m here for the long haul.”
I don’t know how to respond to the last half of her reply. The hope in her tone has me speechless. I never expected her to take the blame, to admit that she was the one who broke my heart. But this, an admittance that she wants to stay, is shocking.
I honestly don’t know how to respond.
As I stare at the woman I promised to love until eternity, the wall hours of drinking built around me feels like it is already cracking.
I don’t like it.
I don’t want to let her in. I can’t. I won’t survive a third round of heartache. But as she stands before me, vulnerable and raw, my guard drops.
“Why?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper, needing closure. “Why didn’t you show up?”
Emerson looks down, her shoulders slumping as a handful of tears escape her drenched eyes. She is quiet for so long that I think she will never answer me.
When she does, it goes differently than the numerous scenarios I’ve run through my head over the past ten years. “I was scared. Scared of what I was feeling. Scared of getting hurt.” Her eyes lift and lock with mine. “Scared that your family was right.” She sees me shake my head, but she acts as if she didn’t. “We were young, Mikhail—”
“And what we had was fucking perfect.”
Her lips shift upward as she nods. “It was. It was perfect.”
She moves forward, her steps cautious.
Her mouth tilts higher when I don’t pull away this time. Don’t look at me like that. The love we once shared has turned into a battlefield, and we’re both wounded soldiers struggling to stay alive.
Even fighting with her, I’ve breathed more in the past three days than I have in the past three years.
As Emerson removes the shard of glass from my hand, she confesses, “If I could change anything, I swear to you that the first thing I would change is that I would walk through those doors instead of walking away from them.”
Doors?
The truth smacks into me like a ton of bricks and pulls the world out from beneath my feet—not in a good way.
She was there.
Outside the church.
She made it that far but didn’t enter.
That hurts to acknowledge.
It hurts so fucking bad.
It shouldn’t maim as much as it does, but the betrayal cracks something deep inside me. It makes me a shell of a man I had hoped to be and has me lashing out.
“If you’re handing out genie wishes, I guess I’d wish to have never wasted my last coin on a jukebox in a pub no one outside of Lidny had ever heard of.”
I don’t know what hurts more. The physical discomfort of ripping Emerson’s heart out of my chest and handing it back to her, or the way she looks past me, as if she can’t see me standing directly in front of her.
I shouldn’t be surprised she can’t see me. I don’t recognize myself when I say, “You should go. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”
The alcohol dulls the pain in my foot as I race for the bathroom, but it can’t numb the ache in my heart when Emerson doesn’t come after me.
Chapter 30
Emerson
The darkness of the owner’s suite matches the murkiness sloshing in the area my heart once sat. Tears threaten to stream down my face as I replay my fight with Mikhail and the cruel words he spoke for the umpteenth time. I would have given anything to hurt him as he had hurt me, to lash out with the same level of vindictiveness, but I made my bed when I suggested we keep quiet for now about Andrik’s part in Mikhail’s heartbreak, and now I must lie in it.