When he had done that, he had taken his feelings away as well.
So why did his chest hurt so much?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VIOLET WAS STUNNED. All she could do was sit there in the center of their marriage bed, alone. She had known that he would have an issue with her loving him. She had. But she hadn’t known that he would do this.
Why now? Why had it come to this now?
All this time he could have set her free. He could have made this bargain with her.
And suddenly she felt very alone. Her whole family had been here for the wedding today, but she hadn’t had enough time to speak to them. Would she have found strength from them?
She could call her sister. Her mother. Her father even.
She knew what Minerva would say, actually. Minerva would want her to do what made her happy. But Minerva would also say that sometimes difficult men needed you to believe in them until they could believe in themselves. Because that was what had happened with Dante.
But no one had helped Violet up until this point. This had been the most independent she had ever been. Yes, it was somewhat enforced by the entire situation, but it was still true. She had to stand on her own two feet since she had been brought here. It had been difficult.
Difficult to face the fact that her relationship with her family hadn’t been what she thought. Difficult to be thrown in the deep end of independence, when she had been so surrounded by the people that she’d loved for so long. The people that she had depended on for her entire life.
But all of this had been about choice. A lesson in it.
Ironic that she’d had to be kidnapped and dragged across the world to really face the fact that she wasn’t her own person. Not that what she had built wasn’t hers to some extent.
But she had been propped up for so long by her father, and then was angry about the fact that he had been controlling things from behind the scenes when she had...
She had been fine with it as long as it had benefited her.
Allowing him to invest money when she had needed it.
Knowing that he was there as a safety net.
But nobody was a safety net for her in this. Because her heart was involved, her emotions. And there was no one who could fix it but her.
Her and Javier.
But he had broken it, because he was afraid. Whatever he said, he was afraid.
She understood what he thought. Understood why he felt the need to protect himself so fiercely.
There might not be real curses in this life, but there was pain that could feel like a curse. Betrayal that could make you feel changed.
And there might not be magic spells or incantations, but there was something even more powerful.
Love was the magic.
And she
was going to have to figure out how to make it work.
She didn’t have a spell. Didn’t have anything to make the fairy tale literal.
But then, the beast wasn’t on the outside. It was inside of him.
And it wasn’t made of the sins of his father, wasn’t made of tainted blood. It was made of fear.
And love couldn’t exist alongside fear. Because they would always fight with one another. Love demanded bravery, and fear demanded that you hide.