Page 62 of Cruel Juliet

Beside me, Petyr shifts closer. For a while, neither of us speaks.

When he breaks the silence, his tone is surprisingly soft. “I don’t want to keep you locked up the way I have been.”

My breath catches. I turn my head and search his face in the dim light. “Are you going to let me out?”

“I don’t know.”

Disappointment spreads inside me. “Then what’s the point?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Why are you still keeping me here, Petyr?”

His jaw works before he answers. “Because I need to know you won’t run. I can’t protect you if you disappear on me again.”

I let out a quiet laugh. But it’s not a laugh, not really. It’s too bitter for that.

“You think I wanted to run?” I whisper. “I ran because you threatened to take my baby and send me back to my father. What choice did I have?”

His hand tightens on my waist, but he doesn’t argue right away. His silence is its own kind of answer.

Finally, he says, “I wouldn’t have let him touch you. You know that.”

“You said it yourself,” I shoot back. “You told me you’d take her from me. That you’d throw me back to him once you got what you wanted.” My throat feels tight. “You don’t get to rewrite that now.”

He exhales slowly. “I was angry,” he admits. “I said shit I shouldn’t have. I didn’t mean any of it, Sima.”

I stare at him in the dark. If he’s telling the truth, then it’s everything I ever wanted him to say. That he wasn’t serious about his threats—that he was lying.

But if he was lying before, why should I trust him now?

“You can’t keep expecting me to trust you when you act like this, Petyr.” My lips press into a thin line.

His brow furrows. “I’m trying.”

I shake my head against the pillow. The weight of his arm around me is heavy, comforting and suffocating all at once.

“You say you want my trust,” I whisper. “Then stop giving me reasons to run.”

He doesn’t answer right away. His fingers flex against my hip, restless. “Would you ever want to go back to them? To your family?”

Something about the way he asks makes me pause. His tone is strange, flat but hard to read. Like he’s not sure he wants to know the answer.

“Of course not,” I say firmly. “Never.”

That’s easy to say, because it’s the honest truth. After my father married my sister off to some old man, I knew I’d be next. I wastwelve. That was enough to make me run. Better the streets than being sold like property.

Living alone at that age was brutal. I scraped by on whatever I could find, slept in places no child should. But even at my lowest, going back was never an option.

“My father isn’t a good man,” I say. “He’d have broken me down until there was nothing left. Like he did with Lara. I didn’t want that for myself, just like I didn’t want it for her. I chose the streets because they were safer than the fate he had in store for me, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

These days, I keep thinking about Lara. I always have, but lately it’s constant. I wonder what her life turned into, if she ever found a way to be happy.

I hope she’s okay. That the man our father gave her to didn’t crush her spirit the way he would have crushed mine.

I stare at the ceiling, my voice softer now. “So, no, Petyr. I’d never go back.”

“Not even for your sister?”

Tears well up at the corners of my eyes. “She isn’t there anymore,” I whisper. “I think about her all the time. I’d love to see her again. But she wouldn’t be under that roof. And if she was…” I shiver at the thought. “Then I’d want to break her free.”

Petyr’s hold around my waist grows tighter, and I know it means something. I’m not sure what yet. If it’s his way of saying he trusts me again, or that he’s still trying to. God knows he’s fighting demons of his own. He was raised in the same rotten environment I escaped, and that doesn’t go away overnight. I know that.