Chapter 1: Prologue

Katerina:

When do you stop?

When do you stop caring about a person who doesn't care at all about you?

When do you stop loving someone who despises you?

When do you stop thinking about someone whose thoughts never concern you?

When do you stop giving up so much for someone, sacrificing your entire life for someone who would never do the same?

When do you stop being married to a man who behaves as though he was never wedded to you?

When does it end?

For me, never. I could not make myself stop loving him no matter how much agony he brought me. I could not stop myself from feeling pain when he felt pain or from smiling when he was happy, or from defending our relationship even when others said we were wrong for each other.

I knew we were. I knew that to him, I was nothing more than a wife on paper, nothing more than a contract, a means to an end, and the promise of an heir to take over his legacy. But to me, he was my husband—flesh and blood and bone. Heart and soul and spirit. I told myself it was my religious principles that made me stick it out with him, that made me refuse the idea of a divorce—but in the end, it was him.

It was him, and him only, that kept me from leaving.

***

Alexander:

How do you keep yourself from loving someone?

How do you turn off your heart and shut it away and use your head instead?

How do you stay alone and be at peace with it?

How do you keep yourself away from the one person you will not let yourself care for when they are just within your reach?

I couldn't love her. But I did.

Despite all my attempts not to, despite all the times I tried to see only her flaws, however few, and none of her beauty, her selflessness, her intelligence, and passion…I could not.

I could not help but fall in love with her. With the one person I swore to never love, never to care for—because once I did, I knew I would break her. Because that was what I did to everyone I loved.

And because she deserved so much more than to be a broken, empty wreck of a woman that everyone I loved became. Yet I was selfish.

I was selfish enough to love her, and I was too selfish to stay away.