(x) continued from here.
She takes his hand to place the palm of it flat against her cheek, and it quivers. Touching her burned hot and quick like whiskey on the back of your throat. It made him ache, made him feel as if she were slicing him open and squeezing his heart in a suffocating touch. He wrenches his hand away and takes twelve steps back. He needed distance, almost craved it. He needed to breathe as he took in what she was saying. He was loved. He was worthy. But, not by her. “Bullshit,” he says. A whisper of a word to himself. He didn’t believe her. Not after everything Nadiya said. Not after finding out what she sold her life for, or rather who she sold her life for. A person wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel something. Nikolay takes a moment to look at her. Really look at her. She looks like Freyja, and yet at the same time like a dead person. The Bratva have already wrung out her girlhood and twisted her into this stony, less than human thing. He saw past the blank stares and dullness in her voice, though, because that used to be him. So, instead, he repeats himself, louder. “Bullshit.” The hand that was pressed to her skin balls up into a fist. “You are terrible liar, Volkova. Your actions say truth your mouth can’t.”