Page 42 of Watch Me Burn

CATERINA

A aron’s penthouse feels different tonight.

Muted somehow.

Not the suffocating kind of quiet I’ve come to expect here—but the kind that follows something violent. Something almost fatal.

The bullet missed his heart by an inch.

One inch.

And now I’m kneeling beside him like that single breath of space isn’t still echoing inside my chest.

The towel beneath him is soaked—antiseptic, blood, the scent of his skin. I press harder, trying to stop the bleeding, trying not to scream.

He’s alive.

And it’s maddening.

Because he didn’t care if he wasn’t.

He moved without a thought. Threw himself into the line of fire like I was worth the fucking bullet. And I can’t decide if I want to slap him, or claw inside his chest and demand to know why.

My hands are steady, and my focus locked. But my mind is spinning, stuck on the image of his body dropping, of blood soaking through his shirt.

I’m not used to any of this.

I’ve broken men before.

But I’ve never had to watch one break for me.

And I don’t know how to carry that.

I press a fresh cloth against the torn flesh at his shoulder, biting the inside of my cheek when he flinches.

“Hold still.”

“It’s fine. You can stop.”

“I’m not done.” My voice comes out too sharp. I don’t know how to say I thought you were dead without screaming it.

His fingers brush my chin, coaxing my face toward his. “It was a calculated risk.”

“Calculated?” I press the gauze harder than necessary against his shoulder. “You took a bullet for me, Aaron. That’s not strategy. That’s fucking irresponsible.”

“I’ve done worse.”

He says it like he’s talking about fixing a leaky pipe. Like stepping into gunfire is just part of the job.

“Would you rather I let them shoot you?” he adds, quieter now.

I don’t answer. I can’t say a word because I still see his body dropping, blood spreading like ink in water, slow and unstoppable.

I finish the bandage and smooth it down with my thumb. But I don’t pull away. Neither does he.

“I had it?—”

“I know,” he says, steady and unflinching. His gaze holds mine, like he’s searching for something beneath all the anger. And I hate how much I want him to find it.

I look away. “Why do you keep doing this?”

He doesn’t answer. Just watches me like I’m some unsolvable equation.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I whisper. “Not from you. I didn’t expect it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“That’s not true,” I say, clipped. “You keep getting hurt because of me. And one of these times, I won’t be able to fix it. They tried to kill you tonight, because of me. What part of that haven’t you processed?”

He flinches, not from pain this time but from the truth. Still, he doesn’t speak.

“You can’t keep doing this. Throwing yourself in front of me like your life doesn’t matter,” I push.

“It’s not that it doesn’t matter.”

“Then what is it? Give me a reason.”

He looks at me like the silence is the reason. Like I should already understand.

But I don’t. And that terrifies me more than the blood, more than the war we’re in.

I shove away from him. My legs move without permission. I cross to the window, eyes sweeping the city. Lights blur. Movement distorts. I search for something solid to hold onto, but everything feels too far. Too false.

Behind me, the leather groans as he shifts and then, a soft sound of pain. I expect him to retreat. To shut down. To rebuild the walls I never asked him to tear down in the first place.

“I didn’t think I’d make it back.”

My breath catches. The city blurs behind the glass. I grip the windowsill until my knuckles burn white.

“I knew it when I hit the ground,” Aaron says, voice low, stripped of everything but truth.

“When I felt the blood spreading. I knew I wasn’t getting up.

And the only thing I could think was that I’d never see you again.

That I wouldn’t get to tell you…” He trails off, the words hanging in the silence between us, unfinished yet somehow deafening.

I close my eyes. Feel the weight of it press into my chest. My lungs tighten with the pressure of unshed tears, and for the first time in years, I don’t know how to breathe. The world keeps moving outside—cars, people, light—but mine stopped the second his body hit the ground.

I turn slowly.

He’s standing with his hands balled at his sides, bare chest rising and falling beneath bloodstained gauze. His eyes lock onto mine, wide and unguarded. Like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he blinks.

“Tell me what?” My voice isn’t even a sound. Just breath and hope.

His throat works around a swallow, the sound raw in the silence. “You want to know why I did it? Why I stepped in front of that bullet without a second thought?”

I nod, because speaking feels impossible, like my voice has been carved out of me.

“Because I’m so fucking in love with you it’s destroying me, Caterina.” The words tear out of Aaron.

Hearing him say it cleaves something wide open in me, splitting me apart at the seams.

“I hate how it consumes me,” he continues, his voice splintering.

“How it makes me insane with need. How I can’t breathe in a room without cataloging every exit, every threat, because you’re there and the thought of losing you makes me want to tear everything apart.

I don’t know how to exist in a reality where you don’t make it out alive. ”

Everything else disappears—the room, the pain, the fear—until there’s only him, only this moment.

“I’ve been fighting it, denying it, telling myself this marriage was strategy, that you were just an assignment I got too deep into.

But that’s bullshit. It was never that. It’s you, Caterina.

You’re carved into my fucking soul. Every breath I take, every choice I make, it all comes back to you.

I’d take a thousand bullets if it meant keeping you safe, and I wouldn’t hesitate for a heartbeat. ”

A sob claws up my throat but never escapes. I press harder against the glass, needing something solid to anchor me as everything I thought I knew crumbles.

Aaron moves closer, each step deliberate but careful, like he’s approaching something wild that might bolt. Like he’s not the one bleeding his heart out in front of me.

“I don’t want control,” he says, his voice breaking completely now.

“I don’t want to own you or win some twisted game.

I just want you. So if you’re going to run, if this is still just strategy to you, do it now.

Walk away. Because this is me with no armor left, all I have left of me.

Every shattered piece of what I used to be belongs to you now. ”

He braces his hand against the wall, head bowed like saying those words out loud detonated something buried so deep it’s now hemorrhaging through every crack in his wall. My knees threaten to give out.

My entire life was built constructing defenses against moments like this—moments that strip you bare, that leave you nowhere to hide. Moments where the person who could destroy you with a word already has, just by existing.

Because this isn’t a man begging to be loved. This is a man laying down his weapons at my feet, offering up his throat. It’s not romantic or soft or gentle. It’s surrender. Brutal, devastating, and so fucking real it makes my chest cave in.

My heart hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape. Every survival instinct screams at me to run, to tear myself away from this precipice and retreat to the familiar safety of blades and vengeance and silence.

But I can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t look away.

Because everything I’ve been taught about love is a vicious lie.

It’s not weakness, it’s something far more terrifying than that.

It’s irreversible. It’s the kind of truth that rewrites your DNA, that changes the fundamental code of who you are until there’s no going back to the person you were before.

And I’m already gone.

My hands tremble. My mouth opens, then snaps shut again as I try to speak. Try to breathe. Try to stop the truth from coming undone inside me. But it’s too late, it has been for some time.

“You weren’t supposed to mean anything,” I whisper, my voice fracturing into something I don’t recognize. “You were supposed to be a threat I could neutralize, a complication I could contain. Not...this.”

Aaron doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. He just watches me with that devastating steadiness, patient in a way men like him are never taught to be.

“I didn’t think I had anything left to feel,” I continue, the words scraping raw from my throat.

“Not after the things I’ve done, not after what this world took from me.

I don’t know what this is between us or what to call it.

But when I saw you on that ground tonight… bleeding, broken, not moving...”

My voice catches like there’s a blade lodged in my windpipe.

“It felt like someone reached inside my chest and ripped something vital out. Right here.” I press my palm over my heart, feeling the frantic, violent rhythm beneath my ribs. “Like it had already stopped beating and I was just waiting for my body to catch up.”

Aaron’s hands rise to frame my face, warm and calloused, and he brushes away tears I didn’t realize had escaped. I don’t stop him, don’t pull away. I let them fall—salt and heat and every emotion I swore I’d never show another living soul.

“I’m not used to being scared like this,” I whisper against his touch. “I don’t know how to do this.”

His forehead drops to mine, our breath mingling in the space between us. “Me either.”

We stand like that, suspended in the silence, holding each other like we’re the only solid things left in a world that’s just crumbled around us. Clinging to a thread neither of us understands but neither of us dares to sever.

When his arms come around me, I don’t fight it. I collapse into him completely, letting him catch the weight of everything I’ve been carrying alone.