Page 18 of Empire
I swear softly in Italian.
“Exactly,” Ruslan mutters. “So yeah, I had a woman on my arm. Because if your father’s looking for weakness and my father’s looking for softness, then giving them a neat little picture to misunderstand buys us time.”
Us.
That word should not matter as much as it does. It matters anyway.
I look away again because the alternative is to look at him and know I’m losing this fight. “We should still end it,” I say, but there’s no strength in it now, and we both hear it.
His hand tightens slightly at my neck. “No.”
I scoff. “You can’t just say no and make that true.”
“Watch me.”
Despite myself, a laugh breaks from my mouth, quiet and bitter and too close to fond. He hears that, too. Of course he does. Ruslan misses very little when it matters.
Then his expression changes again, turning open in a way I almost can’t bear.
“Don’t ask me for that, Not to leave. Not to stop loving you. Ask me for anything else. Ask me to lie better, disappear faster, break somebody’s fucking teeth, whatever you want. Just don’t ask me to walk away.”
“Ruslan…” I say, and my voice betrays me completely.
His forehead comes down to mine, and suddenly we’re standing there breathing the same cold air, too close to be safe and too far gone to fucking care.
“I miss you when you’re gone,” he says softly. “I count the fucking months.”
I swallow hard.
“Six months,” he continues, almost to himself now. “Six months of thinking about you in rooms you’re not in, hearing your voice in my head when I’m with other people, wanting to tear half these meetings apart because I know you’re three floors away and I still have to wait.” His thumb moves once at the nape of my neck, the gentlest thing in the world. “You think that’s only physical?”
No. I don’t.
That’s the problem.
My hands, traitorous things, rise to his chest and stay there. I feel the steady thud of his heart under my palms. He goes quiet the second I touch him, as if he’s afraid any movement might break whatever fragile thing this is.
I should step back, but I don’t.
“No,cuore mio,” I say before I can stop myself.
My heart.
The endearment slips out raw and unguarded, and the look that crosses his face nearly undoes me. He closes his eyes for half a second as if the words physically hurt him, then opens them again and kisses me like he’s starving.
Not the brutal kind of kiss we start with when anger’s still burning through us. This is slower, deeper, almost unbearably tender. His mouth moves against mine with a kind of care that makes my throat ache. I grip his shirt and kiss him back because, at this point, denial would be insulting to both of us.
When he finally breaks away, we’re both breathing harder.
He rests his forehead against mine again and lets out a shaky breath that would sound weak on anyone else and devastating on him. “There you are,” he whispers.
There’s too much peace there is in his voice when he says that. As if pulling me back from that edge matters more than whatever damage we’re doing just by standing here.
My fingers tighten in his shirt. “If you ever pull something like that again without warning me first, I’ll shove you off this terrace.”
He smiles properly then, small, boyish, and only half there because the rest of him is still too serious tonight. “You won’t.”
“I absolutely will.”
