Page 52 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cassandra

I’ M FILLED WITH HORROR . With a sick sense of betrayal. Shame. Embarrassment. Because I believed…

I believed in our beautiful fate.

All the while it had been a manipulation. He had shaped our fate with his tattooed hands. Hands that have blood on them.

I should be afraid, but I can’t bring myself to be afraid of him.

I don’t understand why. He should be scarier to me now than he ever has been.

He’s confessed that he killed his own father, even if he did deserve it.

Even if he did it to protect a defenseless boy.

A desperate act in a moment of desperation.

But I genuinely believe he doesn’t think he did it because he cared.

I think he did.

But he can’t see it.

He’s… He’s not a good man.

Not in the way society measures such things. Not in the way I should measure them.

And if I had known that the day that we met then…

I look at him, and I want to tell him I would never have gone with him. I want to tell him that all of this is insane. That what he’s told me is so far beyond Greek myth we’ll never be able to get past it.

Hades and Persephone look functional by comparison.

And yet…

I’m breathing hard; I’m on the verge of tears.

“We’ll never know if it’s true,” I say, because that is the truth. It’s a truth that I wish I could overcome.

I wish I knew. But he didn’t give me a chance.

He’s given you one now.

“You said that I could leave you. That if I found the truth about who you are, what you did, and I couldn’t bear it that I could leave you and you would allow it. Now that you remember who you are, Dragos, do you still stand by that?”

“Yes,” he says, the words broken, “I do. I promise you, that if you cannot abide by this, then you can leave me. I will see that you’re protected. I will… I will protect you from anyone who wishes to harm you.”

“Who will protect me from you?”

“You can hire someone. I will finance it.”

My heart is pounding. “What if you would’ve told me? All of this.”

“Oh, yes, that is fantastic. In your mind I could have gone up to you having your happy friend time in the sun, and said come with me to the underworld, and you would’ve gone?”

A shiver of fear races down my spine. “I just might have. Because I ignored every warning sign that flashed in front of me that first night. I knew that you were… Something I wasn’t going to be able to handle.

And I still… I still wanted to go with you.

If you would’ve given me a chance, maybe I would’ve gone. ”

“Well. This is the truth. Of me. And so now what decision do we make?”

“Why don’t we start with giving me more than five minutes to decide. You’re not who I thought you were. We’re not what I thought we were.”

Panic is rising up inside of me, and I decide that I have to leave. I just have to get away from him. I have to think. It reminds me of when I ran in London. When I could no longer bear the weight of the two of us and I had to go be by myself. So that I could untangle it alone.

I push myself away from him, and I run out of the office, down the hallway and back to my bedroom. I close the door, and I lock it. I know Dragos well enough to know that a lock won’t stop him if he decides that it can’t.

I’m shaking. I sit down on the bed.

All of this is a lie. All of it. He manufactured us meeting.

It wasn’t fate; he’s a stalker.

I tell myself that, over and over again because I know it’s what I should think.

Because I know that I need to be looking at this for what it is.

Any therapist would tell me that it was dangerous.

That he’s dangerous. He’s a criminal. As much as I was able to understand about his…

His family business… He’s the Romanian Mafia.

And our entire marriage is a contrivance that he created.

I tell myself that, and I wait for it to… To matter.

I wait for him to be something other than Dragos to me.

We have never had it sweet; we never had it romantic.

But against my will I remember Paris, and him washing my hair. I’m lying to myself. We have had it romantic.

There has been sweetness.

It’s been forgotten these last couple of years, but it was there.

But he was… Lying.

I take a deep breath; at least I tried.

I don’t know what to do. I can leave him. I realize that. He’s given me… Not permission, but his word that he’ll allow it if it’s what I need. But is it what I want?

I don’t know where this leaves us. I don’t know what marriage vows mean when you discover that everything about your relationship is a lie.

But I can’t hide from him. This is the business of us, and we have to work through it.

I tried before. He didn’t allow it. But he’s different now.

He’s told me that he loves me, and in all the years of our marriage he never did that.

Now he has his memories. His memories and this time that we shared here.

Maybe I can try to talk to him again. Maybe it will be different.

He hid things from me, but I’m not blindsided by that. I knew he was.

I overlooked everything I didn’t want to see.

I went willingly. People might look at him and see a monster, someone controlling.

I told myself he was, but didn’t I walk into his house?

Didn’t I stay out of my own free will? I wanted him, and I looked at him and saw a man could never be called normal and I went anyway.

I did what I knew he wanted because I wanted to please him, not because he forced me.

He never once forced me to do anything. He didn’t manipulate me. He never harmed me, never threatened me.

I built my own cell, brick by brick, out of my fear. My fear that if I knew everything about him I’d feel obligated to leave. My fear that if I asked how he felt about me he’d say he didn’t love me, and I’d have no more excuses.

I gave everything up for him, because I chose to.

Then when I missed those pieces of myself, I left him because I have never figured out how to be…

balanced. How to love art and have a life, how to love him and maintain friendships and do my art.

How to leave him and…live. I was still in the attic, even then.

Painting and painting because I’m not any more balanced than he is.

I don’t have the excuse of a tortured childhood. Just my own mind. My own passions that own me, control me.

In him, I’ve found a match in so many ways. A man who gets off on my passion. A man who can meet me there, but I have to learn to master myself. It’s not enough to just ask him to master me, and I know that.

I wait until I’m done shaking. Until I have a little bit more control over my breathing. I stand up and I open the door. There he is, sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with one knee drawn up, and one leg out straight. He looks despondent.

Like I’ve never seen him.

“We need to talk. Not just about things you want to talk about. But the things I feel like I need to know.”

“If that’s what you wish,” he says.

“It is. It’s what I need. I need to know how you saw our marriage. Did you feel like you were tricking me? Did you feel like I was your…thing? That’s how I used to think of myself. A piece of your collection.”

He shakes his head. “No. That has never been how I saw you. I was never laughing at you. I was never enjoying keeping secrets from you. I wanted to keep you safe. What I found with you was something separate to the life that I’d been raised to live.” He lets his head fall back against the wall.

I reach my hand out. “Come inside,” I say.

He reaches out slowly and he takes my hand.

I lift him up, drawing him to his feet. And we look at each other for a long moment.

I think of all the times that he picked me up to take me to bed.

But we aren’t going to bed. Not right now.

Now we’re going to sit, and we’re going to talk.

And say the things that we should have said all these years.

“Let’s go back into the office. I want to be able to look at everything. To understand everything.”

I shake my head. “I don’t need you to lay out the proof. I don’t really care about it. I… What I need to know is your heart. Not the things that you’ve done. Though I think I need to know those too. But whatever you tell me, I’m going to believe you. Whatever you tell me.”

He nods slowly, and leads me into the bedroom.

We sit down on the edge of my bed, holding hands, and it reminds me of how we held hands at our wedding.

He looks up at me. “I was never making fun of you. What I built for the two of us was an escape for myself. A sanctuary. You believe better of me than I’ve ever believed of myself.

Than anyone ever has. You made me feel like there was something in me that was worth caring for.

I told you, the minute that I saw you for the first time I suddenly cared about my life in a way that I never had.

I was never laughing at you. I wanted to spare you.

I thought that perhaps I could keep that life away from you.

That I could keep that part of myself away from you.

Because I had to from you in the beginning so I thought that maybe I could do it forever. ”

“Oh… Dragos. I don’t think that works when you’re sharing a whole life with someone.”

“I wanted it to,” he says fiercely. “I wanted for the two of us to have something, to have more than I’d ever had. I wanted to cling to what I felt the first time we met, and I wanted to hang onto your feelings for me. You said that you loved me so quickly. So easily.”

“I thought that it would chase you away.”

He growled. “Never. No woman had ever told me that she loved me.”

“And what were your other relationships like?”

All these questions, some of which I avoided asking because of jealousy. Some questions that he simply refused to answer. All things I know I need to ask now.