Chapter 276

“What?” Everything in me halts to some weird frozen moment, suspended in time and my manic panic calms instantly to surreal numbness. One questioning word jerked out of me in response to his statement.

Standing in the lift facing him while he holds the doors wide, only feet apart and so close to escaping I can almost taste it.

Tears stop and my body stills. I openly stare at him in complete shock. Brain stuttering on his words and unable to react whilst in a state of disbelief.

I stop my noisy breakdown and hold very still, breath paused, emotion idling while I wait. The hysteria of a moment ago fades to this eerie silence between us as I pause for an explanation, an expansion of his sentence. Of a meaning to him saying the word love, to me, of all people.

He can’t love me. It makes no sense. He hates me. He hurts me, he always has.

But he just told me he loves me, and he will do anything to keep me.

My brain is melting. I don’t know how to process any of this.

It must be a game plan. This is who he is—a manipulator. Cruel sadistic devil and he doesn’t love. He could never love me.

He shunned my confession of the same thing not so long ago. This can’t be real.

I lean back against the lift wall heavily, to steady my suddenly lead weight of a body and jelly legs and give myself space to try to process some of this.

I can’t believe we have come full circle and here we are again.

The same apartment where I poured out my soul at his feet, and he pushed me away into the cold and lonely solitude of a broken heart. Where I put a gun to my head and tried to ease myself of the pain he inflicted.

This place where he shunned my love. He now has the nerve to tell me he loves me. If that isn’t some sick twist, then I don’t know what is.

I’m almost afraid to breathe. It’s like his words have stopped everything around us and between us and even time itself is hovering in some suspended alternate reality.

Alexi looks panicked, eyes on me widening as he glances away down to his feet nervously and then back at me hesitantly, swallowing hard. The atmosphere filling with his own trepidation and consuming the air around us. I don’t know how to feel but the delay seems like an eternity and the waves of his own emotion are upping the tension of every ticking second.

Waiting for him to lie again and cut me down over and over. That’s what this is, surely? A well-planned devious manoeuvre. To crush my soul again.

It’s agony. A form of torture and I wonder if this is all part of another sick move. I don’t know why he needs to keep hurting me. I don’t know what I ever did to him that was so bad he needs to destroy me this way.

“I said …” He clears his throat finally, an awkwardness overcoming him, and he can’t seem to keep still. Nervous energy overtaking, moving almost in a fidgeting manner as he inhales heavily, almost willing himself the courage he doesn’t feel.

This is not the Alexi I know, and it only deepens the knot of something large and painful, growing in the pit of my stomach.

Fear maybe. Anxiety? Anger?

It’s a far cry from the self-assured manipulator I know and hate. This is a glimpse of someone entirely new. A side he keeps well hidden from the world and I don’t know if it’s even real. A side that is throwing me off kilter and I’m suddenly faced with a stranger and a head full of doubts and chaos that’s threatening to choke all oxygen out of my body.

A rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Knowing I’m about to be mowed down in another Alexi head fuck. I should run. Go. Not wait for a reply, but my feet won’t move, and I hold my body still in anticipation. My dumb heart clinging on by one thread that maybe it isn’t a lie.

Stupid pathetic girl.

I should know better.

It’s always a lie.

My heart races, clinging tightly to the things in my hands for some sense of grounding to reality. Hurting myself with my own shoes and bag which only remind me I was running away to save my sanity. I shouldn’t have stopped.

But like a fool, here I am, and I just stare at him, holding my breath and waiting … endlessly waiting.

Tick, tick, tick.

A new kind of agony.

“I love you.” He says it huskily, softly, with less conviction, more haste and obvious fear.

Three little words that steal my air with a pain so intense it feels like he has stabbed me in the chest.

His voice is lower and raspier as though he struggled to get the words out a second time and he cannot look me in the eye as confidently as he did. Eyes finally coming to rest on mine, and for the first time in all the months I have known him, Alexi looks scared and so very young. He looks like those words are terrifying to him and he just let out the biggest secret he has harboured deep down for a lifetime.

It has the same effect as punching me in the throat unexpectedly and I try to shake it away, frowning at him while my insides bleed out and my head is filled with a foggy confusion. My whole-body prickling with cold shards of dizziness.

Shell-shocked. Thrown, I have no clue how to digest these alien words from the devil’s tongue. Lie or no lie? Believe or don’t believe?

“Why are you saying that to me?” I reply desperately, voice strained and raw. All the stilled emotions coming back in force all at once, in a tidal wave, and I’m so very overwhelmed with a dozen conflicting feelings. Trying to pull apart my tangled confusion.

I need to figure out what sort of angle this gives him or why he is trying for this instead of letting me leave. If there is more to his games, and I have re-opened that door.

I should never have had sex with him. I knew it would change everything once more. Start another round of his specific kind of cruelty. This is how he gets his kicks.

“Because I mean it … I just …” He sighs through his words heavily, still acting like a completely different man. One who is almost shy and awkward and not him. Not Alexi Carrero by any means. It fuels my suspicions and rakes the burning embers deep down inside. Anger and hatred growing in the doubts at this contradictory show.

That inner fire in me is battling to be dominant and she takes a grip of me steadily, firmly, giving my soul a massive shake, rattling my senses into high alert.

This could be a trap of devious proportions and he could be poised and ready to rip my soul from my body all over again. Just for shits and giggles. Just because he enjoys destroying me over and over. Just because this is who he is.

“Stop it. This is lower than low. What the hell do you get out of this? Why do you need to do these things to me?” I snap at him, tears drying on my skin as a sense of self-preservation floods me instead. Head trying to grasp on the most obvious answer—Alexi and mind games. It’s all this could be.

“I’m not lying. Why do you think I have spent weeks trying to show you that things are different? I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I knew this would be the reaction if I just came out and said it. I needed you to have a reason to believe me first, so I had to prove it to you. I knew you would run otherwise, because you had no reason to trust me.” He moves towards me suddenly, but I recoil and sink slightly into my feeble position, shifting to the corner of the lift in a half-crouched foetal position. Still so afraid of this man’s ability to maim me. He pauses, seeing my obvious fear as it envelops me, and holds still. Raising his palms a little to indicate he won’t come any closer and has to quickly grab the door as it starts to close again. Keeping his hands locked firmly on the sides of this box-like prison.

Angry or not, this man still has the power to ruin me in heinous ways, and I’m still trapped in his lair and the focus of all his attention. I’m no fool. I’m vulnerable and unable to hold my own against him. He proved that so many times in the past. He doesn’t need to touch me to end me.

“Believe you? BELIEVE YOU? Why the fuck would I believe you saying this shit to me, Alexi? You spent months torturing me, making me feel worthless. You sent me away, you broke me into a thousand pieces and told me to my face I meant nothing to you. Why would I believe you suddenly did a U-turn and changed everything you felt about me?” I gasp and thrust my words at him, sounding more venomous than I feel inside. Pulling myself back up to standing but I still stay jammed in my little space to keep him far from me.

“I know, Cam … I know! My head was a mess; I had no idea how I really felt when everything was so fucked up and confusing, and I didn’t want to trust you in any way. You fucked me up. You made it so I was all over the place and I didn’t know what I was doing or feeling, didn’t know what I had. How could I admit I loved you when I didn’t know what was real? I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know what this was between us.”

He looks at me pointedly, voice hoarse and eyes steadfast on mine. His apprehension fading away and hints of that domineering arsehole peeking back through. Somehow it gives me more courage to see the familiar in him.

I almost choke on his words though, pain and bitter anger rising inside of me. So much rage for what he just said to me. The utter bullshit in that little speech.