I heard myself say her name again, but quieter, because something in me already knew I had lost the right to raise my voice.
She looked back once.
“Good luck with your future, Pietro.”
She walked out.
CHAPTER 23
EMILY
Ifelt numb from the moment I walked out of Pietro's apartment. Not the cotton-wool numbness of shock. That had worn off somewhere around the second day, leaving behind something less forgiving. What remained was the numbness that arrived, I had read once, when the nervous system finally stopped bracing for a threat that was no longer present. I still startled at doors, still clocked exits in rooms. I had spent two days sleeping in four-hour stretches and waking up with my hands fisted in the sheets before I remembered where I was.
The kidnapping happened and I was not pretending otherwise.
What Pietro had done, however, was its own separate wound, and one I was angrier about.
All his beautiful words, all that careful tenderness, all the noble language he wrapped around the decision, and in the end it proved nothing more than a prettier disguise for condescension and cowardice.
The problem, for me, was not even the danger.
That, I could have forgiven.
I fell in love with a man like Pietro Benetti with my eyes open, or as open as they could have been, and despite never wanting to witness that darker side of him so directly, I could have made peace with it. The fact that I knew that about myself was unsettling enough to make me question several things, including my previous understanding of morality and my taste in men.
But that wasn’t what made me leave without looking back.
What I could not forgive was his complete disregard for my voice in the matter.
The man who had praised himself for giving me choice every step of our relationship, the man who had looked me in the eye and said I did not belong to him just because he loved me, still decided he could unilaterally end us the moment fear whispered he knew best.
He took the one thing he claimed to respect most and stripped it from me the second it became inconvenient.
That was the betrayal.
Not the blood.
Not the violence.
Not even the lie.
His arrogance.
His certainty that because he had the power to decide, his decision was the one that would stand.
I’m writing a whole thesis about men like him.
I, Emily Hart, who spent her academic career mapping exactly this mechanism, had still walked straight into the center of it and called it love.
The worst part was that it was.
I would not fight that.
I had no desire to become a prop in his tragedy, no interest in standing by while he cast himself as the noble protector and me as the woman too fragile to choose her own damage.
If he wanted to be another man deciding my life for me while calling it love, then he could do it without the comfort of my forgiveness.
At least, that was what I kept telling myself as I pulled my coat tighter over the humiliating elf costume and trudged through the snow toward the bus stop for the mall.