Chapter 464: You Love Me
Cecilia didn’t know how she would feel.
That was the truth of it. The whole way here, sitting in the passenger seat of the Hijet while Momo hummed and Bunny napped in the truck bed, she had turned this question over and over in her mind.
Facing the most Arzhen a version of Arzhen could be, she thought she would feel the pain in her heart again. The same pain she had felt in the real world.
The pain of a heart being ripped out of her chest.
In this world, her heart was intact. That was the difference.
In the real world, Arzhen had bonded with her, and the bond had nearly killed her.
But in this world, there was no bond. There had never been a bond. Her heart was and would always be whole.
But how would it feel when she looked at him again?
She had met him once before, in the School Romance scenario. But it wasn’t him him. In that world, he was younger. He wasn’t a beast.
He was just a school boy with a sharp tongue and a chip on his shoulder, and none of it had been real. That Arzhen had been a shadow, a sketch, a character in a story written to teach her something about magic.
He hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t even had the chance.
But in this world, he was her actual ex-husband. A beast. A weretiger who could have killed her to get rid of their bond, if they had bonded.
Just like in the real world.
Just like the man who had stood over her while she bled.
Arzhen Vasiliev in this world truly felt like the real Arzhen in the real world.
"What do you want?"
She had asked it without guile or strategy. She wasn’t even trying to look or sound a certain way. She was just curious.
She was curious how her heart would feel when he answered.
"I will forgive you, alright?" Arzhen hissed, his claws still extended, his fangs bared, his chest heaving with the effort of holding himself together. "I’ll take you back. What more do you want?!"
"I don’t want anything from—you, Arzhen." Her tone almost rose on the last word, but she stopped herself.
"Bullshit!" The word cracked through the cafe like a whip. Arzhen stepped forward, his claws gouging shallow furrows into the marble table as he passed it. "Everything you do is to make me admit that I can’t live without you!"
Cecilia’s eyes faltered.
"You are mine, Cecilia Araceli, always!" Arzhen spat—
CRASH!
His tail lashed so violently it shattered a vase on a nearby table. He didn’t notice. He didn’t care. "Even if you suffer, you are supposed to be only mine!"
"Are you hearing yourself?" Cecilia’s voice came out in a hiss, low and dangerous.
Arzhen didn’t know what possessed him. The words were tumbling out of his mouth, and somewhere in the back of his mind, a quiet voice was asking where they were coming from.
This wasn’t what he had planned. Not the cold, calculated negotiation he had rehearsed. This was something—that felt like it came from a different world entirely.
"Why can’t I make you happy? Why—?!" he roared, his voice cracking on the last word. The question splintered into a dozen unfinished fragments. "Why am I not enough?!"
Cecilia looked at him incredulously. Her head tilted slightly, her brow furrowing in genuine confusion. What was this man talking about?
"Ruby will smile no matter what I do!" he continued, the words pouring out of him now like a dam breaking. "She will laugh with what I give her! Why can’t you?!"
"I WAS HAPPY WITH YOU! ARZHEN VASILIEV—WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!"
Cecilia’s voice rang off the marble walls, louder than she had intended.
She had been happy. That day when he asked her to go out, just the two of them, she WAS happy. That day he ripped her heart out of her chest—
Even before—through his coldness and neglect, through their seven years of marriage, she had found MOMENTS of happiness.
She had convinced herself those moments were enough! She had told herself that the good days outweighed the bad, that his cruelty was just stress and disappointment that she wasn’t the woman he loved so—that she could fix him if she just tried hard enough, loved him enough—
"I CAN’T SAVE EVERYONE LIKE YOU WANTED TO! LOOK AT ME!"
Arzhen’s voice faltered.
He suddenly heard himself saying them. And for the first time since she had walked in, he was silent.
What—who...?
His claws retracted fully and his fangs receded. His hand lifted, slowly, and touched his own mouth, as though checking that the words had actually come from him.
That voice, that desperate, breaking voice—had that been his?
Those words—about saving everyone, about not being enough, about looking at him, where had they come from?
They didn’t belong... to this world.
They didn’t belong to this conversation.
They felt like something pulled from a dream, or a nightmare, or a life he had never lived but somehow—
Cecilia stared at him.
In pain.
"I’m evil, Cecilia," Arzhen whispered. That something had taken over again—that voice from another world that didn’t belong to the man standing before her and yet couldn’t have come from anyone else. "I’m not you."
"I’ll never be like you, a righteous saintess who knows everything." He hissed the words, but there was no venom in them. Just anger. The long, slow burn of a resentment that had been simmering for years and was only now boiling over. "Who saves everyone."
He didn’t have the power.
He had money and influence and a name that opened doors across the country. He had claws that could tear through steel and instincts that made him a terror in any fight.
But he didn’t have that. The thing she had.
The thing that made her stand on a dam and push back an ocean. The thing that prompted her to predict disasters with nothing but data and knowledge and do whatever she could to spread the words across—
He was just—Arzhen Vasiliev.
"Why can’t you... just be mine?" Arzhen’s eyes broke into a single tear. One drop, sliding down his cheek, catching the morning light before it fell. "Why can’t you be as evil as me?"
Why couldn’t they be the same?
If they were the same, he wouldn’t have to feel this way. If they were the same, he wouldn’t have to look at her and see everything he wasn’t.
If they were the same, she would have stayed. She would have understood him. She would have looked at his cruelty and called it love, the way Ruby did, the way everyone else did, the way the whole world seemed to accept him exactly as he was except for her.
"Why do you use everything you have to save people, when I’M RIGHT HERE?!"
The roar returned. Yet there was no anger left. Only grief.
"Why are you not happy with just ME?!"
He stepped forward. His foot crunched on the shattered porcelain of the vase his tail had destroyed. His eyes, dark, wet, desperate, were locked on her face, and he stepped forward again, and again, closing the distance between them until he was close enough to touch.
"Save me! Only me!" His voice broke, splintering into something that might have been a sob. "I want to be the only one you saved, Saintess!"
Cecilia stared at him.
Her eyes were glassy now. Arzhen blurred in her vision, his black eyes and sharp features softening into a watercolor smear.
She understood now.
"So you never cared... that I was a fake Saintess?" she whispered.
Arzhen’s eyes widened. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
"You never cared that I was Ruby’s replacement?"
He never cared. That was the truth that had been hiding beneath every insult, every accusation, every time he had called her worthless and fake and a pale imitation of his precious Ruby—
He had never believed any of it. He had just told himself he believed it. He had told himself she stole Ruby’s place, that she was a worthless nothing compared to her—because he needed to believe it. Because—
Because he felt worthless to be with her.
"You told people the empire stopped looking for her because I was there." Cecilia’s voice was steadier now, though the tears were still falling. "You told people I was worthless and a fake, because you wanted me to be a worthless fake because—"
Her breathing hitched, her chest heaving with the effort of holding herself together.
"—because you are?"
Arzhen’s face bled with emotion, dying to break.
"You’re never happy, Cecilia," he hissed. "Never with me—"
"BECAUSE YOU NEVER TRIED!"
Cecilia exploded.
"You never tried to save ME! You didn’t even try to MAKE me happy!"
Arzhen faltered backward. His claws had retracted fully, and his fangs were gone. His ears were flat against his head, and his tail hung limp and motionless behind him.
"ONCE!" she screamed. "If you told me you loved me once—"
Arzhen broke.
"I love you—" He lunged forward and grasped her arm, his fingers wrapped around her skin desperately. "I love you. I love you—"
Cecilia’s eyes coldened.
The tears were still there, still wet on her cheeks, but the meaning behind them had drained away. She looked at his hand on her arm and she felt nothing.
"You always know I love you—" he whispered, his voice fraying at the edges.
"I didn’t," she said, pushing him away, freeing her arm from him.
"YOU LOVE ME!" Arzhen screamed—
"I did," Cecilia answered. "But not anymore."
She turned toward the stairs.
She walked. Her footsteps were steady on the marble steps. The cloud necklace was clutched in her hand, the silver chain cool against her palm and the pendant pressing into her skin.
"CECILIA!"
Arzhen lunged after her, and stopped. A transparent wall had appeared between them, shimmering faintly in the morning light like heat rising off asphalt.
He slammed into it with both fists. His claws came out again and raked across its surface, leaving no mark. He punched it. He kicked it. He threw his entire weight against it. Nothing. The wall didn’t even flicker.
"NO—"
He spun around, his eyes wild and his gaze landed on the glass window that overlooked the street. The street where she had arrived. The street where she would be, if he could just get there fast enough.
He ran.
His feet crunched through broken porcelain. His thigh caught the edge of a table and he didn’t feel it. He reached the window, and he didn’t slow down.
CRAAAASH—
The glass exploded outward in a shower of glittering shards. Arzhen burst through it, his body twisting midair, his tiger instincts taking over as he landed on the sidewalk below in a crouch.
His ears swiveled. He looked left and right.
"CECILIA—"
The morning sun reflected off the windows of the buildings around him. A few passersby had stopped to stare at the man who had just crashed through a second-story window. A car honked somewhere in the distance.
She was gone.
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