Page 35 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER THREE

I SPEND THREE hours crying in my room, and I hate myself for it. Sitting on the bed in the dress he bought me weeping like an infant because…

Because he saw his father die.

Because his father killed his mother, and Dragos had once been a boy who had found her.

Because he used it to hurt me, rather than using it to tell me something real about himself.

Because I don’t know him.

I don’t.

All this pain, all these scars, and he acts like they don’t touch him. Like they mean nothing. I can’t figure out if he’s being honest, or if this is all how he protects himself, but I don’t know if I can possibly bear the weight of that unknown anymore.

I wanted to unlock him. I wanted to find my way to him but he doesn’t want to let me and I find that so unbearable to face.

Maybe I should fight harder but everything feels hopeless tonight. Like I’m wandering through a maze and whenever I think I just might have found the way out, I hit another wall.

I’m beginning to think he isn’t a maze after all. Just a trap.

I stand up, and I walk to the mirror. I wipe the mascara trails off my cheeks, because Good God, Cassandra, get it together . I lift my dark hair up off my neck. I’m sweaty and upset and the air feels cool on my skin. I look at myself. I really, really look at myself. At the stranger I’ve become.

I think I wouldn’t mind her so much if she wasn’t so lonely.

But I feel like there’s a surging channel between myself and Dragos and I can’t swim across it.

I’m angry then, so angry, all mixed together with my hurt because we were really something.

We were.

That first moment we met was magical. Like a miracle I hadn’t even known to pray for, and instead of taking that magic and making more with it, he’d wrapped his fist around it and trapped us both, stagnant and locked in this tower where we can never, ever get closer to each other.

I can’t leave this alone tonight.

I can’t let it go.

I leave my room and I make my way down the hall.

I don’t knock on his study door, because if this house is the only place I’m allowed, then I refuse to act like part of it might not be available to me when I want it. I refuse to act like he might not be available to me. Even though I know he feels differently.

Dragos is in charge. We both know that.

Made even more difficult by the fact that we like power games in bed. We play lots of games, but in some of them he’s my master and I surrender everything to him. Sometimes, he puts a collar on me and it makes me feel good, because it makes me feel like I’m his.

But there are times that it bleeds into our lives, and it picks at my own insecurities. When we met I was nothing more than a waitress. He took my arm, he led me out of there and he made me his. But he is the one with money.

He is the one with power.

I feel that every single day. The wedding ring has become a manacle.

He is sitting behind a wide black desk. Polished, gleaming. Just like him.

Like we didn’t just have an earth-shattering conversation. Like he didn’t just tell me about childhood trauma I could never have guessed at.

Perhaps I should have.

Perhaps my mistake has been thinking he’s a man with a rough surface, who must have humanity beneath.

Maybe he’s rough all the way down.

His tattooed hands are pressed down on the surface of the desk, and he is focused on something in front of him. He looks up when I walk in.

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to you.”

I love him. That’s the thing that enrages me then. I want him. That’s the thing that hurts.

If I could only despise him. Then I would’ve left him.

I would’ve left him six months into the marriage if I would’ve known what was going to be, as long as I didn’t love him.

But the problem is I do love him. With every fiber of my being, with every part of my soul.

And I try to tell myself that it can’t be love because it isn’t like we behave the way that a normal couple does.

But I wouldn’t know normal. I know Dragos. And that’s it. He is my only experience of men. He is my only experience of love. I want to leap over his desk and… Maybe strangle him. Maybe make love to him. I’m not entirely sure.

The feeling is too powerful to keep contained inside of me, though. I am finding it nearly impossible to breathe past it.

“I thought you might need your rest tonight after the conversation we had on the terrace.” He says this with his head tilted to the side, and someone who doesn’t know him observing the scene might mistake it for concern. Compassion.

I know him, however. Which means I know it’s neither of those things.

He does such a fantastic impersonation of a human man. And yet, in his deepest heart, he is more machine than anything else.

The way he took me to bed that first night and held me. The way he looked at me whenever he bought me a new dress. The way he proposed, with rough desperation in his voice, as if he didn’t understand what was happening between us either. Like I wasn’t the only one who was inexperienced.

If only that could change the way that I feel about him. It hasn’t yet. It probably never will.

“I’d like to know why you said that and then walked away. Why you didn’t even give me a chance to respond.”

“I didn’t need your response,” he said.

“Why?” I ask, my tone filled with desperation and I’m not even in the mood to hide it.

“Why would I need it?”

“When people marry they share things. When they care for each other they talk. I want to be there for you and you won’t let me.”

“I do not require you to be there for me in that way. I don’t need anyone to do that for me. If I had needed it, I would have told you so.”

Is he getting what he needs from other places?

Other women? I’m undone by all of this, and I can’t even pick which thing wounds me the most. That he might have betrayed me.

That he doesn’t care about me. That he doesn’t share with anyone, or that he shares with someone who isn’t me.

That I might want to stay, that I definitely need to leave.

I just don’t know.

“But I’m your wife,” I say.

“Yes. You are my wife. And you are a very good one. Very beautiful.”

I reach my breaking point then. All of my hurt, all of my regret, my pain, my everything wells up inside of me and explodes.

“Is that all I am to you?” I’m yelling. In the sacred space of his office, I am yelling at this man.

Who is fearsome and frightening, who just spoke to me of smiling over his father’s dead body and yet I don’t care.

Because I need to say this. I need to say what I’ve been holding back. I need him to hear me. I need him to see me.

“That is all a wife needs to be,” he says.

“No. I’m not a wife . I’m Cassandra. And I’m an artist. And I had dreams once, Dragos, and they were not to simply rattle around your house waiting for you to come to my bed.”

All the lies I let myself believe crash through me. Back in the beginning with him it seemed like I wouldn’t need art school when every moment with him was a canvas of inspiration.

Now all I have are canvases filled with black and gray.

“I told you I’d buy you a gallery.”

“ I told you it isn’t the same! You hear the words that I’m saying, but they don’t mean anything to you.

You don’t know me, you don’t understand me.

I’ve given you my whole life story and you still don’t know me.

The information is just sitting inside of you like facts written on note cards but you haven’t…

learned what that means to me. How it makes me who I am. ”

“You are hysterical. You know full well that we often do not make it to bed.”

“But that can’t be all there is.”

Maybe I’m the one who isn’t being fair. Maybe I’m the one who’s changing the rules, but I don’t think so. I’m sure that even the sex used to be different. I’m sure of it.

“What is it you expect?” His voice has gone hard.

The word is on the tip of my tongue, but I’m almost afraid to say it. Still, I know this is it. This is the end. There’s no point holding anything back. Not now.

“Love. I would like love. For you to say it as well as show it, and it can’t just be…it can’t just be gifts and orgasms, because that’s not the sum total of a relationship. Of a marriage. If you wanted a mistress then you shouldn’t have married me.”

“Cassandra. That is not what marriage is to me. And I thought that we agreed on this. That what we have is all that is needed.”

“I’m telling you that it isn’t.”

“Are you?”

I lose my temper then, and I do move. And I find myself reaching across his desk. I grab hold of his black tie—why is he wearing a tie at home?—and I pull him toward me.

Our faces are nearly pressed together. “I’m unhappy.”

“Why?” he growls. “Look at this place that you have. You’re ungrateful.”

“Yes. The prison is very nice.”

“This is not prison,” he says. “You know nothing of prison. You’re having a temper tantrum, and I find it unseemly.”

“I don’t care what you find seemly. I am not an object. I’m not a mistress. You married me.”

“So I did.”

“Are you having an affair?”

He looks furious. Offended, even, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen Dragos offended . “You ask me this?”

“You’ve barely been home for months.”

“First you object to the fact that there is sex in our relationship, and now you are acting as if you would be wounded if I gave that sex to someone else. Which is it?”

He was scratching at the inconsistencies I was already enraged at in myself.

“It can be all of those things, actually. Because most people are complicated. But you… You are desperately simple, do you know that? I feel that you fancy yourself very important because you have a lot of money and you are constantly working, and everybody seeks out your opinion on things, but you don’t do anything except work and… ”