Page 54 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dragos

I WALK INTO my own house feeling like a stranger to myself.

Because while I am the same man who left this house in a rage, a fury of fear and anger, looking for his wife who ran away to Paris, I am also something entirely different.

Something is changed in me fundamentally.

Because even when I was on the verge of dismantling my father’s crime empire, I wasn’t doing it for the greater good. Or for good at all.

This is something I finally speak out loud to Cassandra as we take dinner on the same terrace where we had dinner the night she left me.

I’ve cooked for her again, in hopes that I can redeem that last time together, when I fundamentally destroyed everything.

“I wasn’t aiming for a redemption arc when I decided to turn everything and everyone over to the authorities, not with the broader world.

I wanted you . I wanted to be someone you could…

talk to. I wanted to be someone you were safe with.

And it was becoming clear to me that it was going to be difficult for me to keep you if I was having to oppose my father’s enemies at the same time. ”

“His enemies? I thought they were all part of the same organization.”

“It’s a difficult balance. There is a constant threat of betrayal, backstabbing. Everyone is on guard always. How can you trust the person you’re forming an alliance with when they’re all murderers and thieves?”

“Isn’t there a pirate code, or something?”

“Only in the movies.”

“It sounds like ungentlemanly warfare.”

“It is. But I have never claimed to be a gentleman.”

She’s silent for a long moment. “If you were really doing all this for me, then why did you say those things to me that night before I left?”

I have to sit there and try to remember.

I have to dig through all the detritus in my mind, trying to make sense of what exactly did happen.

Why I said those things. Because she’s not wrong.

If keeping her was the most important thing to me, why would I say that?

Why, when she bore her soul to me, did I say that she was nothing?

A mere waitress. Beneath me. When I was in the process of moving heaven and earth for her?

“Love,” I say finally.

“You did not say all of that because you love me.”

“I said it because I was afraid that I loved you. I… Love is not something I was ever taught to esteem. Love is not something I was ever taught to want. My mother and father never even said that they loved me, let alone each other. It was something that my life was completely void of. And then I met you. I could never figure out quite what you were. I could never sort out what we were. And when you came to me, demanding certain things, I found it confronting. I didn’t want to face it. ”

“Well, you very nearly destroyed us both.”

“I don’t know how to do any of this.” For the first time, maybe in my entire life, I feel close to being defeated.

There is so much work to do. So much unpacking of the baggage inside of me, and I’m not certain that I want to.

I was willing to dismantle this empire on her behalf.

More than willing. Money means nothing. Power means nothing.

Not if I can’t have her. But all of this?

Digging down to the very bottom of all that I am?

Digging down into what makes me feel, what makes me act, that I do not enjoy.

I’m not even certain it’s possible.

“How do people do this? How do they go to dinner and share their lives and… What? They decide they want to be together based on all this?”

“I do believe that historically they generally also want to sleep together.”

“Well, I did that without having to take you to dinner.”

“Yes. But look where that got us.”

“Married.”

“Dysfunctionally,” she points out.

“I’ve never had a friend,” he says. “I don’t know how to do this.”

Cassandra looks at me as though I just told her the most heartbreaking thing she’s ever heard. “Dragos. You’ve never even had a friend?”

“What good would a friend do me?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about human connection.”

She sounds far away when she says this, and I wonder if perhaps it’s too late for me. If maybe I’ll never truly learn how to have all this. I feel like I love her. When everything was erased inside of me, that felt like the one truth that remained.

But here and now it feels like a mountain I can’t quite climb and I’m not certain what I meant to do with it.

“They’ve done studies about that,” I say. “Babies who are neglected, and miss out on fundamental attachment phases, then they can’t ever bond to another human.”

“You can’t seem to let me go,” she says.

And that is perhaps the most encouraging thing anyone could have ever said to me. Because maybe I can care about another person then. Though I know my version of it is sharp, I suspect that love is supposed to be soft.

But then, how would I know?

“I am not going to be bankrupt, you know,” I say.

“Well, that’s nice to know.”

“I had begun streamlining my business. Sectioning off the parts that were legitimate. And I’m going to make sure that I devote some of my profits to charity.

That’s a good thing.” I feel very much like I’m lost in paint-by-numbers morality.

Hoarding too much wealth is bad. I’ve seen that in many articles.

Giving it away is good, and I’m trying to be good.

I have to make sure that I do all of this by causing the least amount of harm.

But really what I want to do is build palaces for Cassandra, and wrap her in silks and jewels.

Really, she is the only thing that I care about.

I find everything else quite boring.

But I want to change. Because she has asked me to do that.

Because she needs me to do that.

And what she wants matters to me. It matters so damned much.

“That’s… That’s great. And if you want help with any of that…”

“Actually, what I would really like is to have a gallery. An auction. Anyone you can think of from your school who you thought was quite talented. And perhaps your art. If you will allow me to arrange it. I know that you didn’t want me to give you a gallery…”

“An art auction? For what?”

“A charity.”

“What charity?”

“It doesn’t matter. Does it?” I ask, feeling frustrated.

She looks at me for a long moment. “Think of something that you care about. Your charity is allowed to be one that you choose. It’s allowed to be an issue that matters to you. What matters to you?”

Something inside of me feels shaken. I don’t know how to respond to this.

And yet, there is one looming issue that comes to my mind.

As I remember watching my father strike my mother.

As I remember both my parents lifting their hands to me.

Slapping me into silence. My father hitting my face with a closed fist.

“Domestic violence,” I say finally.

What a mundane thing. I was a victim of child abuse. My mother a victim of domestic violence, as well as a perpetrator of it.

These are things that every person deals with. My father made it seem like we were special. Kings of the sort. People who mattered. Above the law, above all manner of petty things, and we were just a home full of violence.

One of the most common ills in all the world.

“That’s wonderful,” she says. “And I would love to contribute work to that. And I’d love to contact my…my old friends.”

“You haven’t had them in your life much since you met me.”

“No. I haven’t. Things have been too different.”

“Then contact them. We will… We will have the charity event at the place where… The place where you met me. And I suppose it is still where I met you. Even if I had seen you before.”

She takes a deep breath. “I’m not angry at you about that anymore.

It’s another thing that you didn’t understand.

You didn’t know how to go about meeting somebody that you wanted to meet.

But you could’ve just come over and said hello to me.

The effect would’ve been the same. I was drawn to you from the first moment that I met you.

You made me act out of character. You made me do things that I never wanted to do before.

It would’ve been the same then. But actually realizing that…

Realizing that made me think that being mad at you about that is silly.

You can’t go back and know what you didn’t know.

And I would’ve gone with you either way.

That is the actual truth. Likely, if you would’ve told me that you were a crime lord, I probably still would’ve let you take my virginity. ”

“We sound unhinged.”

“I think we are.”

But I know some measure of peace after that conversation. And then I throw myself into the charity event. Not just to make myself good. But because I find I actually want to do something to change some of the ugly things in the world.

And I wonder, for the first time, if I might actually be changing myself.