Chapter 100 Saint
"I didn't marry a monster," I said fiercely. "I didn't marry your father. I married a man who worked eighty-hour weeks to secure his company but still drove across town at midnight just to bring me my favorite takeout when I was pulling an all-nighter. I married a man who remembered the name of my childhood cat. I married a man who, five years after a brutal divorce, took a bullet to the chest to keep me breathing."
Tristan swallowed hard.
"You put me on a pedestal, Tristan," I told him, my voice softening, "and you put yourself in the gutter. And Ida knew that. She knew the only way to destroy us was to use your own insecurity as the weapon."
"I should have trusted you," he choked out. "I should have asked you."
"Yes, you should have," I agreed, refusing to let him off the hook for the action, even as I forgave the motivation. "You failed me. You broke my heart, and you ruined my life for five years."
He flinched, closing his eyes, the words hitting him like physical blows.
"But," I continued, squeezing his hands until he opened his eyes again. "You also came back for me. You bled for me. You are sitting in this room right now, tearing yourself apart, just to fix it."
I leaned forward, closing the distance between us.
"I love you, Tristan," I whispered, the truth of it ringing with absolute clarity in the quiet office. "Not the billionaire. Not the Titan. Just you. The man who burns toast and buys out movie theaters and gets scared just like the rest of us."
"Mina," he breathed, a single tear escaping and tracking down his cheek.
"Tristan," Dr. Evans said, his voice anchoring us back to the room. "Do you hear what she is saying?"
Tristan looked at the doctor, then back to me.
"I hear her," Tristan said softly.
"She is rejecting the pedestal," Dr. Evans explained. "A relationship cannot survive if one person is worshiping the other while loathing themselves. It creates an impossible imbalance. True partnership requires you to stand on the same ground."
Dr. Evans folded his hands in his lap.
"To truly heal, Tristan, you have to forgive yourself for believing the lie. You have to recognize that you were manipulated at your most vulnerable point by someone you trusted. But more importantly, you have to start believing that you are worthy of the love Minerva is offering you right now."
Tristan looked down at our joined hands. His thumb slowly stroked across my knuckles.
"How do I do that?" he asked, his voice rough and incredibly honest. "How do I unlearn thirty years of believing I'm corrupted?"
"You start by accepting the evidence in front of you," Dr. Evans said gently. "You are an architect of your own life, Tristan. You've spent years designing a fortress to keep people out because you thought you were protecting them from yourself. It's time to start designing a home."
We spent the rest of the hour discussing the mechanics of that redesign. We talked about how to communicate when the insecurity flared up, how to ask for reassurance without demanding control, and how to recognize Ida’s lingering ghost when it tried to whisper in our ears.
It was exhausting work. By the time Dr. Evans announced that our time was up, I felt like I had run a marathon.
But as we stood up to leave, the atmosphere in the room had fundamentally shifted. The oppressive, suffocating weight of the unsaid truth was gone.
The infection had been lanced.
"Thank you, Doctor," Tristan said, extending his left hand to shake Dr. Evans’s hand. His grip was firm, his posture straighter than it had been when we walked in.
"You did the heavy lifting today, Tristan," Dr. Evans said kindly. "I'll see you both next week."
We walked out of the office and down the quiet, carpeted hallway to the elevator. We rode down to the lobby in silence, the hum of the machinery the only sound.
Davis was waiting out front with the SUV, an umbrella held ready against the driving rain.
We climbed into the back seat. The heavy doors slammed shut, sealing us in the warm, leather-scented cabin.
"Penthouse, sir?" Davis asked from the front seat.
"Yes, Davis. Thank you," Tristan said.
The car pulled smoothly into the Manhattan traffic.
I leaned my head back against the seat, closing my eyes. I felt entirely drained, my emotional reserves completely tapped out.
I felt Tristan shift on the seat beside me.
He didn't put his arm around my shoulders. He didn't pull me against his side like he usually did.
Instead, he reached out and gently took my hand. He lifted it, pressing a slow, deliberate kiss to the center of my palm.
I opened my eyes and looked at him.
The streetlights flashing past the tinted windows illuminated his face in brief, passing intervals. The harsh, guarded lines of the CEO were gone. The terrifying insecurity he had confessed in the office was gone, too.
He was looking at me with a quiet, burning intensity that made my breath catch in my throat. It wasn't the frantic, possessive heat of the past. It was something deeper. Something rooted in absolute clarity.
"Are you okay?" I asked softly, the quiet of the car amplifying my voice.
He didn't answer immediately. He kept his eyes locked on mine, his thumb tracing the lines of my palm.
"I've spent five years blind," Tristan said, his voice a low, gravelly murmur that sent a shiver down my spine. "I was looking at a forgery and calling it the truth."
He reached up, his hand cupping my cheek. His touch was incredibly gentle, completely stripped of any demand.
"I see you now," he whispered, his amber eyes dark and reverent. "I see exactly who you are."
He didn't kiss me. He didn't pull me closer. He just held my gaze, the silent promise vibrating in the air between us.
He was done looking at the shadows. He was finally looking at the light.
The rest of the ride back to the penthouse was silent. But it wasn't the tense, fragile silence of the past few weeks. It was a heavy, expectant quiet. A storm gathering on the horizon.
We rode the private elevator up to the top floor. The doors slid open with a soft chime.
We stepped into the foyer.
Tristan didn't walk toward the kitchen or the living room. He didn't take his suit jacket off.
He stopped in the center of the entryway, turning to face me.
The burning intensity in his eyes had ignited into a slow, consuming fire. He looked at me not as a fragile thing to be protected, and not as an unattainable saint on a pedestal.
He looked at me like a man who had been starving in the desert, and who had finally, truly, realized that the oasis in front of him wasn't a mirage.
"Mina," he said, my name sounding like a prayer on his lips.
He reached for me.