Page 74 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
‘I…held her too tightly, I think. I imposed too many rules on her. It was supposed to keep her safe, but she…found it claustrophobic.’ I remember the arguments we had, that I dismissed at the time but that now seem prophetic. ‘She wanted more freedom. She told me that I kept her prisoner.’
‘And did you?’
‘My enemies, they’re—’
‘You need her, don’t you?’ Katla interrupts, her gaze disturbingly sharp. ‘Because you’re afraid.’
There’s a lump of ice in my gut, and it feels as if this woman has somehow seen it, mapped its shape and knows just how far its tendrils have reached into my soul. I don’t like the feeling.
‘Of course I’m afraid,’ I say, unable to mask my impatience. ‘I’m afraid for her, that something will happen to her, and—’
‘And you’ll lose the last person who loves you,’ Katla says in her usual forthright, open way.
My heart stills in my chest. I want to deny it. I want to tell her she’s wrong, that it’s my sister I’m afraid for, for myself. And yet…
Isn’t there some part of you that knows it’s the truth?
There’s something cold in me, a sharp, horrific kind of void that sucks everything I am into it: emptiness; nothingness. The same void that swallowed me when they took Olympia away. Where I had nothing and no one, and I was alone. Where all the people who loved me, who thought I mattered, had gone. And I felt, in some deep-down place inside me, as if I deserved it.
I go to turn away, but Katla reaches for my hand and takes hold of it. She grips it tight, the warmth of her fingers and the pressure of her touch somehow grounding me in the way I used to ground Olympia.
I pause, staring at her, hypnotised.
Her gaze is dark and cool, like the sea on a hot summer day. ‘It’s not wrong to be afraid, Ulysses. It’s not wrong to want to be loved, either. Because if it is then I’m wrong too.’
This woman… The way she looks at me, as if she knows the contents of my soul, is discomforting and I don’t like it. And I especially don’t like how clear-eyed she is, as if what she sees in me doesn’t frighten her when it should. She knows nothing of what I became all those years ago, nothing of my early life as an enforcer. Nothing about the man I was who hurt people and got paid for it.
‘Don’t look at me like that, ice queen,’ I murmur. ‘You don’t know what kind of man I am, what terrible things I’ve done—and, believe me, I’ve done terrible things.’
Katla only looks at me perplexed. ‘What things?’
I can’t tell her all the gory details about myself. She’s quite innocent in some respects and I can’t put that on her.
Bullshit. You don’t want to change the way she looks at you.
That’s true, I can’t deny it. Once she knows what I really am, she’ll see me differently, I’m sure, and I’ve got used to her looking at me with such wonder and interest.
Except, once again, her honesty compels mine, so I say, ‘I was an enforcer for a crime family. I made sure the rules were followed and doled out punishment to those who broke them. I’m sure you can imagine the kinds of things that involved.’
I wait for her expression to change, for disgust or condemnation to appear, but she only frowns. ‘That was your job?’
‘Yes,’ I say steadily, and I don’t look away. ‘And I was good at it.’
She nods slowly, as if she expected nothing less. ‘Of course. I can’t imagine you being bad at anything, Ulysses.’
I want to laugh at that. ‘That is not a good thing. I hurt a lot of people.’
‘You needed to get your sister back,’ she points out. ‘And I can imagine that job prospects for a sixteen-year-old weren’t great.’
‘There were plenty of legal jobs I could have taken.’
‘But you had to get her away from that family and fast, yes?’
I nod.
‘And illegal jobs pay more, I would think,’ she goes on, following her usual searing logic. ‘So you didn’t really have a lot of choice, did you?’
‘I didn’t think so at the time,’ I say. ‘I don’t regret my choices.’
