“You are crying,” he said, as if he was horrified. She stopped walking and whirled on him, wishing she was stronger, bigger. Wishing she could make him feel what she felt. Wishing she could hurt him.
“I do that often,” she snapped. “Congratulations, Nikos. You undid almost thirty years of self-control in one day.”
“And yet this is the man you claimed to love,” he said, his voice darker and rougher than she remembered. Almost as if he hurt, too, though she knew that must be impossible. “This monster, who would do this terrible, unforgivable thing!”
“I know what you did,” she gritted out. “You did it to me. But why are you here? What could you possibly want?” She laughed then, the kind of laugh that was torn from inside of her, hollow and broken. “I have to tell you, Nikos—I do not think there is anything left.”
“I am not a man worth loving,” he told her. “You were a fool to say such a thing to me, to admit to such a weakness. You should count yourself lucky that I did not believe you—that I did not hold you to such an insane pledge.”
She opened her mouth to scream at him, to demand he leave her before she broke into even tinier fragments, but something stopped her. His eyes were too dark. His mouth was too hard. If he was another man, she would have said he looked almost…desperate.
“Is that why you came all the way to Vancouver?” she asked him, her voice uneven. “To explain to me why I should not have fallen in love with you?”
“There is nothing in me worth loving,” he said, his gaze intent. “You need only look at my history. My mother. My father. My sister. All these people abandoned me, hated me. All of them. One family member, perhaps, could be excused away as an anomaly, but all of them? One must look to the common denominator, Tristanne. One must be logical.”
“Logical,” she managed to say. She shook her head, as if that could make what he said make sense. “You think this is logical? You truly do, don’t you?”
She searched his face, that dark face she had never thought she’d see again, though in the dark of night, when she could no longer hide painful truths from herself, she’d hoped. She saw the truth in it—that he believed what he said. That he had not believed her when she’d said she loved him. That he did not—could not—know what love was. It made her ache. For him, in ways she knew she should not.
“It is as if you have some hold on me,” he said, his voice almost accusing. “I spent years dreaming of revenge, and now I dream only of you. I destroy everyone I touch.” He shook his head. “I am a curse.”
Hadn’t she said the same thing herself? Hadn’t she screamed it into her pillow to muffle the noise, so as not to disturb her mother? So why, now, did she feel herself frowning up at him, as if she wished to contradict him? As if she wanted to argue with him—make him treat himself better than he had ever treated her?
What was the matter with her?
She looked around as if she might find help, or answers, on the sidewalk. But the day was chilly and wet. Everything was gray, except for Nikos, and that hard look in his eyes that made her want to cry and not, for once, for herself.
She could not pretend to herself—when he stood in front of her, when he was within reach, when her palms itched to touch him and her body ached to press against him—that her feelings had changed at all. She wanted it all to have disappeared, or for the anger and betrayal to have bleached away what she’d felt for him.
“I can’t blame you for hating me,” he said quietly. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and she had the distinct impression that he was uncomfortable. He, who had never seemed to show the slightest bit of uneasiness. It sent an arrow spearing through her, piercing through her anger, making it wither away, leaving the maelstrom beneath.
“I want to hate you,” she said, with more honesty than he deserved. “But I don’t.”
“You should,” he bit out. “If you had any sense of self-preservation at all, you would.”
“You are the expert,” she retorted. “Aren’t you? Hate, revenge, deceit. I believe that is your forte, not mine. I merely wanted to marry you. More fool, me.”
“I do not care about revenge!” he burst out. “I wish I had never heard the word!”
“How can that be true?” she asked, dashing the wetness from her eyes with the backs of her hand. “Peter told me. What he did to you. To your family. To your sister—”
“My sister took her own life, with her own hand. Nothing Peter did can match what I did to you,” Nikos said, in that low, painful voice. “I promise you.”