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For her.
For me.
For all the people depending on me.
Loving her meant being willing to sacrifice everything and everyone I swore to protect.
“It’s okay.” She touched the center of my chest with the flat of her palm. “You don’t have to say anything.” But I should. There had to be something to make this hurt stop. If there was, she didn’t give me a chance to think of it when she went on. “I am annoyed this keeps happening.” She gave a humorless chuckle. “First, I lost you to Liya. Then prison. Now this.” Her thin smile wobbled. “I’m beginning to think maybe … maybe we were just never meant—”
I kissed her to stop whatever bullshit thing she was about to say.
“You’re wrong!” I growled against her mouth.
Her eyes swam as she stared up at me. “Am I? Tell me there won’t always be someone ready to take you from me?”
My molars ground together, grinding my feverish and desperate words to pulp to be swallowed again.
She smiled a smile that would forever break my heart and touched my cheek. “It’s okay. At least, I got this weekend.”
“That’s enough?”
Her laugh this time was sharp and brittle and broken by the emotions that made her chin wobble. “No. A lifetime wouldn’t have been enough, but I’ll take it over nothing at all.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe, Darius, even if it’s letting you go.”
Her rationality made all the sense in the world, and nothing had ever infuriated me more.
“I don’t want this.”
She nodded at my shredded confession. “Do you have a better solution?” When I didn’t answer, she sighed. “I do have a few conditions.” Her chest lifted with her deep inhale. “When this weekend ends and we go back, you can’t touch me. You can’t look at me. If we’re alone in a room, one of us has to leave.”
I jerked back as if she’d lost her mind. “I can’t look at you?”
I expected her to laugh and make a joke, but she looked on the verge of bursting into tears. “No!” she snapped, voice breaking. “You can’t. Don’t … I can’t…” she paused to suck in all the air in the room into trembling lungs. “This is already killing me, Darius, and if I walk into a room and I see you and you’re looking at me the way you’re looking at me now and I can’t have you … I … it hurts so much.”
I pulled her to me, into me. I crushed her against my chest with a pressure I knew was too much, but she only held tighter. Her arms cracked ribs as she mashed her face into the curve between my shoulder and neck. Her back heaved against mypalms and the sound could have been a dagger piercing me through the heart.
“I won’t,” I promised, ready to say anything, give her anything to never make that sound again. “I promise.”
Part of me couldn’t help agreeing with her decision; there would never be a time when the sight of her walking into a room wouldn’t take my breath away. That wasn’t something I could control. But maybe if I didn’t look, it wouldn’t hurt as much.
“One more thing.” Her words were muffled by my top, but I heard them as if she’d shouted. “You need to find someone else. The sooner the better.”
I jolted. “What? Why?”
“Because I can’t trust myself.” She drew back and looked up into my face with a solemn sincerity that left no doubt in my mind that this was something she had thought long and hard about. “I won’t be able to stay away from you. I can’t. I know…” she broke off with a sharp shake of her head. “But I’m not the kind of person who would take another woman’s man. If you’re with someone, I won’t…”
“Be tempted?” I partially teased.
But she nodded. “Exactly.”
I would have laughed at the insanity of her idea, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. She honestly believed that that was the solution to this fuckery — me finding someone else. She really thought it was that fucking easy.
“So, you think I can just replace you with another woman?”
To her credit, she actually thought about it, and for a second when her eyes widened with realization I almost thought I’d gotten through to her, then she said, “No, you can’t.” Thoughts of triumph died horribly when she added, “Maybe not a normal woman, but if she’s someone from your circle, she’d be okay, right?”
I stared at her, mind absolutely blown.
How could someone so brilliant be so oblivious?
