Page 51 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

“You can buy their loyalty. And you can buy favors, and those were the only things I wanted or needed. I got you. I got you into my proximity. I got what I needed. And then we met. At the perfect moment.”

“You pretended that you were simply… Attending.”

“I didn’t,” I say. “I told you that I owned the venue.”

“You didn’t say that you arranged the entire thing.”

“No, I didn’t, because that would’ve been counter to my goal. But had you not left with me…” I feel a lashing of shame. Which I know is an unfamiliar sensation for me. “I would’ve taken you.”

She looks at me like I’m a stranger. I suppose I am.

This is a truth I was avoiding telling her. This is a part of myself I wanted to keep hidden. Because I knew she would look at me this way; I knew it would change things.

She thinks she hasn’t been patient enough with me, that my broken upbringing set me up for dysfunctional relationships. But I know when I’m doing something most people would think is wrong, it’s an easy enough thing to recognize. If you feel the need to hide your actions, there is a reason.

My reason is, and has been, that I knew she would find me to be what I am.

A manipulative bastard who puts his own needs before the needs of others.

But I don’t want to lose her. I can’t lose her.

“I thought… I thought I had a spontaneous meeting with the only man that I had ever felt chemistry with.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” I say, because I need to believe it. “You felt it too. When you saw me for the first time you felt the same thing that I did when I first saw you.”

She shakes her head, and she takes a step away from me.

“No. I didn’t feel the same thing that you did.

I didn’t feel like the sun was shining on me.

I didn’t feel like I was suddenly no longer in darkness.

I felt like you were dangerous. To everything that I was.

And I was right. But I dismissed it, I told myself that it was just a little bad-boy fantasy.

But a bad boy’s different than a bad man, Dragos, and every time I think I can connect with you, every time I think… ”

“I had to have you,” I say, moving to her and taking hold of her, my thumb and forefinger gripping her chin.

“And I didn’t know any other way. I have never felt that way about anyone before.

I can have any woman I want. And I have had any woman I wanted.

But then there was you, my Cassandra, and I needed you.

In a way that went beyond sex, though I needed the sex.

Badly. But I needed you. I needed you with me.

Always. You must understand that I never even envisioned getting married.

And once I met you there was no question.

I knew that you would be my wife. Because I knew that you had to be mine. ”

She pulls away from me and holds herself, wrapping her arms around her midsection. “You don’t understand, do you? You took this thing that I thought was a beautiful, spontaneous, fated thing and now I know it’s… It’s more of your machinations. It’s more of your manipulation.”

“Please,” I say, feeling desperate. I move toward her again, and I palm the back of her head, holding her still.

Keeping her from running away. “It was fated for me .” I’m breathing hard; I can scarcely think.

“It changed me. If you cannot… If you can no longer feel as if it was fate for you because I made sure we met again, surely you can see that it was still fate. I did not have to stop that day. I might never have seen you. But I did. And it changed everything. Absolutely everything.”

I have no practice at making others understand me. I’ve never had to.

“Dragos… I can’t…” She clutches her head like I did only a little while before. “Every time I think I am starting to know who you are I realize I don’t.”

“I feel that way about my own self,” I say. “Because it’s true. I don’t know the whole story of who I am, but what I have known from the beginning of all of this is that you were an extremely important part of it. That you are integral to the man that I am.”

“Dragos…” She puts her hands up against her eyes now. “Why are you making this so difficult? Why is every new revelation like an assault?”

“I don’t want to hurt you. And yet I understand that I have. Continually. I was…the day I met you I was doing an arms deal.”

There was a pause.

“Is that what you do?” she asks, her voice thin, shocked.

I sit down on the floor, rest my forearm over my knee. I feel dizzy. Disoriented. Perhaps it’s a lack of sleep. Perhaps it’s something more. And then suddenly all these pieces come back to me in fragments.

Layer upon layer of truth. So many truths that I didn’t want to again.

The truth about me. About where I come from and who I am. About how I idolize my father. About…

“I killed my father,” I say. Even now as I’m horrified by the images washing through me, I feel no pity. No remorse. He was a terrible man. He was a terrible man who was about to harm or potentially kill a child and he needed to be stopped, but I’m not certain that’s why I killed him.

Revenge.

He killed my mother.

Yes. All of this is true. All of it. But still, I was not fueled by a sense of justice, not then. I was fueled by the thing my father taught me to obey. The drive to win. The drive to succeed. To be the baddest, the cruelest, the most powerful possible monster.

It was what he trained me to be, and in the end, I dispatched him when he proved to be a liability. His actions caused great and terrible destruction…

He was threatening the son of one of the men in our village. Our home.

And I stopped him from harming that boy.

My father did bad things in our village, but I never did. I thought it should be our duty to care for those people, not terrorize them.

It’s the closest thing to the Mafia a place like ours would’ve seen. It supports most of the town. Everyone worked for my father. But he also enforced that. His was a reign of terror, and I began to believe that it wasn’t the most efficient way to run a business, or anything else.

He went too far, trying to kill a child in the village. There was no more putting up with it. There could be no more looking the other way.

It had to be stopped. He had to be stopped.

And then, following, they worked for me.

I don’t realize that I’ve said all this out loud until I look and see her face. Leached of color, completely horrified.

“Dragos. You said an assassin killed him…”

“I was the assassin. I had to be. There is nothing good about my family. Nothing good about my father. Nothing good about us, about the way we did business. Nothing. And there is nothing good about the way I do it either. I have taken over the helm of a doomed ship. It is rotten to its core, as is its captain.”

“Dragos… Please. That can’t be true.”

“Of course it’s true. Why you think you know nothing about me?

Why do you think that we were married and I kept everything from you?

Because I thought… Dammit, Cassandra, I thought that if you could just see me, if I was all you knew, then you would not leave me.

I thought that you would remain untouched by it. I thought that…”

“You brought me into this world, and you didn’t even ask me if I wanted it.”

“I know.”

“You… No wonder you were so afraid for my safety. You live in a world of monsters.”

“I know. And I knew that if you knew this truth you would not want me. So I could never let you know. I have never cared for my life or my death but when I saw you for the first time I suddenly had a reason to live, and a very clear understanding that I would die without you. It was the most painful paradox one can experience. Life in my estimation is short and brutal, and I never wanted to extend it until that moment.”

“You’re trying to tell me that you fell in love with me at first sight, and because of that you had to manipulate me. You had to bring me into the space where I could be killed.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew you had to lie to me, because I wouldn’t go with you if I knew this.”

I step forward, and I put my hand on her face. “Is that true?”