‘You want my anger? Then get out,’ he roared, even more horrified that his fury seemed to have exactly the opposite effect on Ella.
‘But how am I supposed to witness your anger if I am gone? No, Roman. Surely better for me to be here and witness you in your full monstrosity, no?’
He wanted to hurl the bottle he still held against the wall beside him, and the only thing staying his hand was that somehow the glass might shatter and catch her. And when everything in him was screaming out to protect her, to keep her from him, that he could not do.
‘What are you doing here? What do you want from me?’ he demanded.
‘I want to know why you lied.’
‘Good God, Ella, everything I’ve ever said to you has been a lie.’
‘Not everything. But certainly all that you said in the restaurant.’
He couldn’t look at her. He had done that day, but it had taken everything in him and he no longer had the energy to fight. He knew that if she looked too hard, thought too much, she’d realise the truth. And he had to protect her from that.
‘You are fooling yourself. Once again. So naïve.’ He forced the cruel words through thin lips.
‘But no longer innocent?’
‘Have I not hurt you enough? Have I not proved to you how depraved and damaged I am?’
‘I will not lie and tell you that. Because there have been too many lies between us and you have hurt me. And I’d not use depraved—that was your word—but damaged? Yes, you have been damaged, but not broken and not irretrievably so. I…’ She paused, and he couldn’t not look at her, couldn’t not face whatever it was that she would say next. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘Hell, Ella. What are you—?’
‘I asked you to trust me. I asked you to trust me to know that you could be better. Trust that I knew that about you. And I let you down. Because at the first sign, the first suggestion that you might not be, I walked…ran even, not looking back. Not looking back enough to see the truth.’
He was shaking then. He was racked by it, the trembling that had started in his heart, spreading out through his body, and he felt the press of hot wet heat against the back of his eyelids. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t…
‘I told you that I loved you and I left.’
She was killing him. Tearing him apart with her words. All the things he had never wanted to face, never wanted to know or feel.
‘I will not take full responsibility for that, because you did have a hand in that. But, for my part, I am sorry.’
He wanted to rush to her, drop to his knees and beg her forgiveness. Beg her to take him back, promise to do whatever it would take to make it up to her. Tell her that…that…he loved her more than life itself. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
‘Ella, please.’ Roman no longer knew what he was asking for. For her to stop, or never stop.
‘Tell me the truth,’ she demanded and he owed her that much.
‘I thought—think—that you deserve more. That you are owed more. After all that I have done, under the guise of vengeance… I simply don’t know how to be. When you asked me to buy your shares, you didn’t know what you were doing. Didn’t know that it would give me the only possible chance of having what I had spent a lifetime wanting. I felt, believed, that if you did love me then you wouldn’t ever have asked me to give that up. Kolikov Holdings was the last tie to my past, to my grandfather, to my mother’s death…and I wanted, needed, it to be gone and you placed, in my hands, the ability to do so—and demanded that I didn’t.
‘Do you understand, Ella? Do you see? The promise I made to my mother on her deathbed, it was a promise that kept me alive, made me get up in the morning, drove me beyond anything else in this world to succeed and achieve the impossible. You made me promise not to do it, and I couldn’t live up to that. I couldn’t because my mother came first. That promise came first.’
* * *
For the first time since she had made him make that promise Ella realised the cost of it. Tears rose to her eyes at the position she had put him in, unwittingly. In her mind, the destruction of Kolikov Holdings was simply the embodiment of his betrayal—of Vladimir’s betrayal—of her. She hadn’t really thought what it had meant to him, what it had symbolised to him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this? Why didn’t you try to explain?’ she asked in a softer voice than the trembling she felt within her.
‘And risk you leaving with my child?’
‘A departure you specifically engineered only a few months later?’ she couldn’t help but interject.
‘The few months it took me to realise just how much damage I could do to you. When I realised that I was too weak not to give in to the urge to destroy the last trace of Vladimir’s hold on this world.’
Ella took a moment to think through his words, the pain and anguish clearly ringing within them. She had been so determined, so sure of her demand when she’d made it, she could see that she would have walked away. Her own pain and anger, the fierceness with which she’d thought she had been in the right.
Taking a breath, she made herself feel the intention of his words, to feel the truth of them.
‘And now?’ she asked.
‘Now?’ Roman seemed confused, as if in his mind there simply couldn’t be a now.
‘Yes. Now, how do you feel?’
‘About Vladimir’s company?’ he asked.
‘I don’t care about the damn company and never want to hear its name again,’ she cried. ‘I want to know how you feel about me.’
She looked
