Chapter 36 Who’s Anastasia ?
RORY POV
What just happened?
“Did you just say you love me?”
The look on Alexander’s face was disbelief and disgust in equal measure.
I nodded. I couldn’t trust my voice.
He scoffed. Bitter and sharp. Like the idea of it was genuinely offensive to him.
“I will never love you Aurora,” he said. “You’re nothing but a fill in. You’ll always live in Anastasia’s shadow.”
My lungs tightened at his words.
That name again. That same name that had followed me everywhere today like a shadow I couldn’t see the shape of.
Anastasia.
I tried to speak. I felt a metallic pressure building at the back of my throat, my vocal cords tightening like overwound violin strings. It hurt. It hurt badly. But I forced it anyway because I had to know.
“Who — who’s Anastasia?”
Silence stretched between us.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then his expression shifted into that particular coldness and I knew he was about to say something that would break me.
“Slim,” he said. “Beautiful. Graceful. The mother of my child. Everything you will never be.” His eyes moved over my face slowly. “And somehow you have stolen her entire face and stolen her son’s heart.”
The words landed one by one like something physical.
Slim. Beautiful. Graceful. Everything I would never be. I had stolen her face somehow.
I thought I knew pain. I thought the years of jabs and insults and body shaming and being picked on had taught me what pain felt like. Nothing, nothing had prepared me for those words. Not from this man. Not from the same man who had just told me he had waited four years for this. The same man who had kissed me like he was starving and told me I was driving him crazy and held my face in his hands like I was something worth holding.
I looked down at my exposed, Size 14 body-the curves he had just been squeezing, the breasts he had been tasting. I felt a wave of humiliation so hot I thought I would melt.
You've stolen her entire face.
The realization hit me like a cold water.
He wasn't seeing me. He was never seeing me.
He was seeing her. His dead wife. In my face. In every moment he had touched me or looked at me or pulled me against him in the dark.
I was a face he recognized. Nothing more than that.
He was just trying to fuck a ghost through my skin.
“Snap yourself out of whatever stupid hope made you think you could love me,” he sneered. “Understood?”
God. I was such a fool. How did I let my heart get this crushed? What made me think he was different from every other person who had ever looked at me and seen something lacking? What made me think that because he held me one night and asked about my day that meant something real was growing in that dark quiet space between us?
Nothing. Nothing made me think that. I had just wanted it so badly I had built it myself out of scraps and called it real.
"Answer me, Aurora! Understood?" He snapped when I remained silent.
I wanted to tell him I understood. I wanted to tell him I hated him. I wanted to tell him he was the most horrible person I had ever met. But my throat was bubbling with pain, a hot, thick sensation rising up my esophagus.
"Answer me!" He roared, slamming his fist into the wall above my head. The vibration shook my skull. I shuddered in blind terror.
I forced the words. I clawed them out of my chest, desperate to satisfy his demand just so he would leave me alone. But when I opened my mouth, no words came out.
Instead, a spray of warm, metallic crimson erupted from my lips.
The blood splashed across Alexander's face, across the front of his suit. Drops falling from my lips onto my bare chest and breasts, trailing down my skin in thin red lines. I felt it leave me — warm and metallic — and I couldn’t stop it.
The effect of forcing speech when my body had decided it was done. My selective mutism pushing back the only way it knew how.
Alexander stared at me.
Alexander didn't move. He didn't reach out. He didn't show a flicker of pity. He just wiped a drop of my blood from his cheek, looking at me like I had done something deliberately to inconvenience him.
"Is this some sort of joke?" he asked, his voice low and dangerous. "Is this one of your stupid tricks that made my son fall head over heels for you? It's not working on me, so stop this bullshit."
The tears came without asking.
I cried. Hard and completely silently because my voice was gone, fully, completely, not even a sound available to accompany the tears running down my face. I couldn’t make a single noise. I just stood there with blood on my lips and my dress around my waist and my chest bare and my heart destroyed on the floor of my own wedding night and cried without sound like a person who had run out of everything.
I watched Alexander’s fist clench at his side.
My vision began to swim, the dark edges of the room closing in. The last thing I saw was the blood on his white shirt before the floor rose up to meet me and the world went black.