A love like ours ✔️

♛40.🔥Blood and genes

Soraya

As Teo kept trying to make me aswer his question, I did my best to deflect it. I should have known it's useless. Between the two of us, he's the more stubborn one. Still, I'd hoped I could avoid this moment until we'll have reached the safehouse.

"You were going to let him know you're alive before me?" He spits out, releasing me.

The cold water runs by my calves, and I try to gather strength from it. It doesn't work though. I knew making him believe I'm dead is already a pill hard to swallow. And now he's going to know the full extent of my deciet.

"He knew all along." I admit weakly.

His body goes still and the golden flecks in his stormy eyes seem to have been set alight. He's working his jaw so hard that there's a chance he'll pull a muscle.

"What did you just say?" He probes. It's as if he's giving me a chance to deny it. The tone of his is calm but it has an icy quality to it.

I've seen him raging before. He can be more terrifying and dangerous than any beast in this jungle. When he spirals out of control, blood gets spilled and bodies drop like flies. Yet never in the 19 years I've known him for has the full extent of his fury been directed at me.

A shiver runs down my spine. Though I know he'd never purposely harm me, my baser instincts recognise an apex predator when I'm faced with one. They scream at me to run. Yet he's my monster, and I'll be damned if I back down in face of his wrath.

"I'm sorry."

"You're sorry!?" He scoffs in disbelief, running his shaky hands trough the dark waves of his hair and griping it at its roots only to release it a moment later. "She's sorry." He mumbles to himself turning his back to me. "Lei è fottutamente dispiaciuta. Dio mio!" He laughs dryly. (She's fucking sorry. My god!)

"You and papa needed to believe I was dead to make it seem authentic. Oscar and Navarro were watching you closely." I try to push the explanation trough the clump of cloying guilt that got stuck in my throat. "I couldn't make Addie or Lo lie to you and risk them slipping up, since you were going to be working closely together for months. Still, I needed someone to help me feed you the intel necessary to bring the Chens down and throw you off my tracks when you were getting to close to my location."

At that he whirls around. "And you thought your ex would be the best option to allow you to achieve that?"

"He was my best option."

"Do you have any idea about the kind of agony you put me trough? You exchanged your life for mine in the Bahamas, even though you knew what your sacrifice would do to me."

"It's you before me." I try to reason, closing in the short distance between us, but he steps back.

"No it's not. No it's fucking not!" He growls. "I thought I was breathing only because you stopped doing so. For the first two weeks after I opened my eyes, each time my lungs pulled in their air, I despised them. Each time my heart pumped its blood I wanted to rip it out of my chest. Then I became a hollow shell driven by vengeance."

My chest constricts painfully. I expected it to happen, and Hiro told me he was spiriling down.

"Rafael," I lay my hands palm up in surrender, the compass still in one of them. "I know my excuses won't solve anything, it breaks me to know I was the source of your pain, but you ought to undersand."

"Understand what? I took away your decision once, is this your way of punishing me?" His feature morph into a scowl. "You could have made me repent in any other way. Are we even now?"