I didn’t miss the her she’d slipped in there.

“I didn’t come here for relationship advice.”

“No.” She smiled sadly. “You came here for me to tell you it gets easier, that it blows over, and you’ll find a sense of control again. It doesn’t, and you won’t. Love only gets worse.”

A sardonic breath left me. “I thought you believed it was just an obsession.”

“Haven’t you heard? Love is an obsession. Some would even say . . . the maddest obsession.”

IT WAS AN INNOCENT QUESTION.

One that exploded in my face like a tripwire.

That was all it took for me to lose my grip completely. Now, I was drowning in the deep, in the blue, and it was too late to save myself.

“I made an appointment to get on the pill next week,” I told him one night while lying in bed, my heart still racing and my skin sweaty from a previous and vigorous round of sex.

I’d been slacking with getting on birth control because I was sensitive to medication and the options I’d tried when I was younger all came with an annoying side effect. The pill made me gain weight, and now at twenty-eight, with a slower metabolism, I knew that was the last thing I needed. Though it seemed I was going to have to take the contraceptive situation into my own hands by Christian’s indifferent attitude about it.

“Why?”

I sighed. “Either you have a hundred children from Russia to Seattle, or you’re being deliberately abstruse.”

He chuckled, correcting softly, “Obtuse, malyshka.”

The sound of his soft laugh made my body light up with warmth. “Well? Do you have a litter of children you haven’t told me about?”

His silence touched my skin, putting my nerve endings on edge.

“I don’t have any children,” he said eventually.

“How do you know that if you’re going around without using condoms?”

“Because I’m not going around without using condoms,” he said, tension in his voice. “You’re the only one I’m sleeping with, Gianna. I thought I’d made that pretty fucking clear.”

I should have stopped here. I should have sensed the strain in the air that stretched the oxygen thin. But I couldn’t. Because I was tired of being a coward, of toeing the edge of Christian Allister, while I let him touch me, kiss me, screw me, and own me.

“Before me, then. I’m sure you haven’t always worn condoms. You seem too blasé about not doing so.”

He ran a hand across his face. “Drop it, malyshka.”

Jealousy rose up in me, piercing a hole through my chest and fueling my blood with bitterness. He’d never been that serious with any of the women I’d seen him with, yet he’d been with one—or several?—without wearing a condom. It made what we were doing feel meaningless. Cheap. The most serious relationship I’d ever seen him in was with Portia, and even then, it hadn’t lasted much longer than the rest.

“Did you use a condom with Portia?”

“Yes.” It was a vehement response. The truth.

Maybe it had been with someone when he was younger. Some teenage Russian hussy. I hated her. Though, I doubted he would’ve had much time for girls while being locked in a prison for most of his teenage years.

I was growing resentful of the questions piling up on themselves, being answered with, “Drop it, malyshka,” and complete evasions. The man had even heard the story of how I’d lost my virginity from my own husband’s lips. It seemed only fair I should hear the same.

“How did you lose your virginity?”

The temperature dipped into the negatives, my breath freezing in my lungs. The air turned bitter, as caustic as the sting of a bee against my skin.

He sat up on the side of the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. Tension pulled tight in his shoulders, his voice emotionless.

“Get out.”

My stomach went cold. “What?”

“I said, get out.”

My throat tightened with humiliation and betrayal.

I got to my feet, picked up a shirt from the floor, slipped it over my head, and headed to the door. I stopped, every cell in my body rebelling at the idea of leaving.

“If you make me walk out this door, I won’t come back, Christian. Not until you have an answer for me.”

He didn’t look at me.

Neither did he stop me.

I shut my apartment door behind me and leaned against it, the emptiness of the place touching my skin. Regret fed on my resolve, until I wanted to turn around and take back the final words that had left my mouth. I wanted to—needed to—go back and fix everything that had gone wrong. Apologize or beg, whatever it took. Thankfully, my pride held steady; I wasn’t going to let him turn me into something so pathetic.

I slept in my own bed that night, for the first time in weeks. It was quiet. A little cold. A tear ran down my cheek, and I told myself I hated him for making me feel this way.

But I didn’t hate him at all.

That elusive feeling, close to panic yet far enough away, was something else entirely.

And, as my heart ached with every breath, I suddenly knew what it was.

“Levàntate!”

I sputtered, shooting up to a sitting position as cold water poured onto my face.

“It is four o’clock, querida! Eres una vaga!”

She’d just called me a bum, but I couldn’t find any energy to complain. I was depressed. And not even because I hadn’t seen or spoken to Christian in two days, but because I thought I loved him. And I wasn’t sure how to deal with the feeling. Where it was supposed to go when it grew too big for my chest. How I would get rid of it if he’d finally realized we weren’t compatible in the end.

He and I were polar opposites. We didn’t make much sense.

But, suddenly, nothing felt right without him either.

Magdalena opened the window. “I told you not to get involved with that man, señorita. You did not listen.”

She hadn’t said anything of the sort. Before he and I had started this relationship, she’d gotten one look at him while I’d been kicking her out of my apartment. Her eyes had gone wide, and then she’d told me to marry him. That I’d have the most beautiful babies, and everyone would be jealous. He’d heard every word of it. Though, it must have been a normal thing for him to overhear because his dry expression didn’t falter.

“Do you know what the best thing for a broken heart is?”

“What?”

“Fresh air. It cured mis hermanas cancer, too.”

It was then I realized I hadn’t moped like this since Antonio. And that was a dark part of my life I never wanted to return to. I was not going to let Christian turn me into another one of his heartsick castaways. I crawled out of bed, showered, and then got dressed in something more suited for a club than a walk around the city.

On my way out of the lobby doors, my gaze caught with another’s. My stomach dipped to my toes. Just the sight of him—every straight line, polished silver watch and cufflinks, blue—it felt like a hit of a drug I’d been withdrawing from.

He wasn’t so professional beneath his clothes. Not so cold in the bedroom, with his hand around my throat and the heat of his body against mine. And not so heartless, with his malyshkas and rough Russian words in my ear.