Chapter 44: Does it hurt?

POV: DIMITRI

He hadn’t expected that word.

He’d expected fear....she’d have been reasonable to feel it. He’d expected conflict, the particular confusion she experienced when her body and her better judgment disagreed. He’d expected maybe the reluctant, complicated arousal she always tried to hide and never quite managed.

He had not expected proud.

He sat beside her in the back of the car with her hand in his and turned the word over in his chest like something he didn’t know the name of yet. It sat next to the other things she’d given him that he hadn’t known how to hold.....I love you, I’m all in, I’m not going anywhere....the collection of things Eve Thorne had said to him that were slowly, irreversibly, dismantling the architecture of a man who had spent twenty years deciding he didn’t need anything from anyone.

He’d started fighting at sixteen. After his mother died and Antonio had moved on and the estate had filled up with a new woman and eventually a new son and Dimitri had understood with the cold clarity of a boy becoming something harder than a boy that the world rewarded strength and punished everything else.

He’d fought because it was the only place where the noise in his head stopped.

In the circle there was no empire, no responsibility, no dead mother and absent father and weight of a thousand people whose lives depended on his decisions. There was only the immediate physical problem in front of him, and his body’s capacity to solve it, and the specific meditative peace of operating at the absolute limit of his capability.

No one had ever called him proud for it.

Not once. In twenty years.

They’d called him brutal. Terrifying. Unhinged. A liability and an asset depending on who was speaking. But pride implied something different.....implied that his darkness was something worth witnessing rather than something to be endured or feared or used. Pride meant she had looked at the worst of him, fully and without flinching, and decided it was worth claiming.

She’d watched him fight and felt proud.

He tightened his hand around hers in the dark of the backseat.

She turned to look at him, and even in the low light he could see the remnants of it in her face....the adrenaline, the heat, the particular expression she wore when she was feeling things she hadn’t fully processed yet. She wasn’t trying to hide any of it. She never really did, with him. It was one of the things about her that undid him most completely....that transparency, so at odds with the controlled, polished woman she showed the rest of the world.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. Her free hand came up and touched, very carefully, the taped cut above his brow.

"No."

"Liar."

His mouth curved. "A little."

She kept her fingers there, light as breath, and he let her. Let her tend to him with that careful, unselfconscious gentleness that she didn’t seem to realize was extraordinary. No one had tended to him after a fight. Ever. He hadn’t known he was missing it until her fingers were at his temple and the wanting of it felt ancient.

"Why do you fight?" she asked.

"It quiets things."

"What things?"

He considered. "Everything."

She seemed to understand that this was the complete answer, not an evasion. She nodded slightly and leaned her head against his shoulder and kept her fingers at his temple and didn’t ask anything else.

The city moved past the windows.

Dimitri sat in the dark with the only person who had ever made him feel both completely known and completely safe being known, and thought about the word soon and what it was going to mean.

For both of them.

***

Back at the penthouse, she cleaned the cut above his brow at the bathroom sink with the focused seriousness of someone who had decided this was her job now. He sat on the counter and let her, watching her face while she worked....the small crease between her brows, the way she bit her lip when she was concentrating, the careful efficiency of her hands.

"You’re going to have a bruise," she announced.

"I have several." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

"I saw." Her eyes moved briefly over his torso....the existing scars she’d memorised over weeks, the fresh marks from tonight layered over them. "Does Marco know where you go? When you fight?"

"Yes."

"Does he worry?"

"He pretends not to."

She almost smiled. Finished with the cut, set the antiseptic down, and didn’t move away. Just stood between his knees with her hands resting lightly on his chest and looked at him.

"I want to come again," she said.

He studied her. "It’s not a safe environment."

"I was perfectly safe tonight."

"Because I controlled every variable."

"Then control them again." She held his gaze, steady and certain. "I want to see it again. I want to understand all of you, Dimitri. Not just the parts that are easy."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"None of it is easy," he said.

"I know." Her hands pressed slightly against his chest. "I want it anyway."

He reached up and pulled her closer by the back of her neck, pressed his lips to her forehead....not a kiss exactly, just contact, just presence....and felt her exhale slowly against his collarbone.

"Get some sleep," he said against her hair.

"You’re not coming to bed?"

"Soon."

She pulled back and looked at him with an expression that said she recognized the word being given back to her and appreciated it.

"Soon," she agreed.

She pressed a kiss to the corner of his jaw.....the unbruised side, careful and deliberate...and went to bed.

Dimitri sat on the bathroom counter in the quiet and touched the place where her hands had been and thought that he was, without question, entirely and irrevocably finished.

Whatever this was.....whatever she was turning him into....he was done fighting it.

He was just done.