I Would Do It Again

"Nothing significant."

He was done washing. He turned to face her, and something in his expression had changed. There was something raw about it, something that suggested the control he usually maintained so meticulously had cracked just enough that she could see what was underneath. He looked like someone who'd been about to lose something and had stopped just short of doing so.

"No one touches you," he said, and his voice was different too, stripped of its usual careful affect, showing the raw violence that lived underneath. "No one comes to this property with the intention of threatening you. No one."

"Julian..." she started, but she didn't know what she was going to say, didn't know how to respond to someone laying their dangerous love at your feet like an offering.

"I will burn this city to the ground," he said, and his voice was absolutely calm even as he said something absolutely apocalyptic. "I will kill people. I will destroy businesses and families and anything else that needs to be destroyed to keep you safe. Do you understand me? Your father was a coward. He treated you like an asset he could leverage into a better position. But you're not an asset. You're the thing I'm willing to burn the entire city for. You're the thing worth destroying everything I've built to protect."

She stood very still. She was afraid, but it was a different kind of fear than what she'd felt when the men were in the garden. This fear was about understanding the absolute seriousness of what he was saying, the knowledge that he meant every word.

"I didn't ask you to burn the city," she said softly.

"I know," he said. "That's not the point. The point is that I would. If they'd touched you, I wouldn't have stopped with breaking arms. I wouldn't have stopped until they'd all been made examples of, until the entire city understood that you were untouchable. That's what this is. That's what you are to me."

"You bought me," she said. "For ninety days."

"I bought you because I wanted you," he said. "Because I saw a photograph and I wanted to know who you were when no one was watching. I bought you because I was selfish and because I could. But somewhere between then and now, that stopped being the entire truth. Somewhere between the first night and today, I started wanting you to stay not because of a contract, but because I can't imagine the world if you're not in it."

He was standing very close to her now, close enough that she could smell him, close enough that she could see the place where his composure had shattered. He reached out and touched her face, his hand still damp from the water, and his touch was asking a question.

"I don't want you to feel like you have to stay because of fear," he said. "I don't want you to stay because I just showed you how violent I can be. I want you to stay because you want to stay."

"And if I want to leave?" she asked.

"Then you leave," he said. "And I don't stop you. And I spend the rest of my life understanding that I had something beautiful and I let it go because I was too afraid to give you a real choice."

She looked at him, this man who'd brought her into his life under false pretenses, who'd manipulated her and bought her and placed himself at the center of her survival. She looked at him and she saw someone who'd just shown her that his fear was as real as hers, that his capacity for destruction was matched only by his capacity for protection.

She didn't kiss him. The rule still existed, the rule about explicit consent, and she didn't want to cross it without meaning to. Instead, she put her hand over the one he had on her face, and she held it there, and she said, "I'm not leaving."

He closed his eyes like she'd just given him permission to breathe. And in the quiet of the kitchen, with Mrs. Chen ignoring them entirely, Scarlett understood that the danger wasn't something external anymore. The danger was internal. It was the way her defenses were collapsing, the way she was starting to believe that maybe he meant what he said.

She wanted to stay.

She was no longer afraid of Julian. She was becoming afraid of what his love might cost her, afraid of how completely she was willing to give herself to him, afraid of what it would mean to be loved by someone so dangerous, so capable of destruction, so utterly unwilling to live in a world without her.

The bruises were extensive. Julian tried to hide them behind long sleeves and careful positioning, but Scarlett had learned to read the ways his body moved like a language, had learned to notice when his usual grace was interrupted by pain, when he favored one side or moved his arm at an angle that suggested injury underneath. She watched him for three days without mentioning it, watched him move through the house with the kind of deliberate control that came from managing physical damage. On the fourth day, she found him in his office and she said, "Play with me."

"I don't play," he said, not looking up from the document he was reading.

"You can sit," she said. "You can listen. That's enough."

He didn't respond, but he followed her to the music room.

He sat in the chair beside the piano — not the one near the window, but the closer one, the one where he could see her hands — and said nothing while she arranged herself at the keys. The Shostakovich came when she reached for it, easier than it had ever been.

She was halfway through the first movement when she heard him say, quietly, "I would do it again."

She kept her eyes on the keys.