Areston thinks he can shield me from his past, but what he doesn't realize is I'm already part of it.
The darkness that haunts him? It's the same one that's been chasing me for years.
I've given him everything-my body, my heart, my soul-and still...
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Juliette Vivienne De L'Aquila is the center of my universe.
Not in some schmaltzy, poetic manner used by weak men to describe the women they love.
No, she's quite literally my anchor, my sanity, and the one constant in my anarchic world.
Everyone else is just noise.
People, schemes, the world—all of it just background radiation, holding absolute insignificance for me.
My wife once casually noted that I'm abyss personified.
I didn't tell her she was right, but she was.
I am an abyss.
I was born as that dark, empty void that pulls everything into its orbit, consumes it all, and leaves nothing behind.
It's who I am.
No one can escape me.
They all fall in line and bend to my will, except her.
She is the only one who manages to stand proud and unafraid at the edge of my orbit, teasing me with her haughty sense of superiority as she tempts and dares me to devour her, knowing it's impossible for me to.
My wife is the only person I cannot bend to my will, the one who has a high tendency to slip through my fingers and shatter me—once again.
She is mine, always has been. However, the fact that she'd abandoned me once—that she had remained absolutely indifferent and resolute towards my desperate attempts not to break us up—never fails to make something dark churn and riot inside me.
I'll never let go of the cold, hard fact that she tore me apart from her and made me live without a significant part of my body—her.
The fact that it can spring up in her mind someday, regardless of my confidence that I'll never let that happen and her repeated assurances that she'd never leave me again, is the only thing that scares me.
Eons will pass by, but nothing will ever wipe those damned memories out of me so that I could finally relax and start actually believing that nothing of the sort that happened before ever repeats.
The only comfort I can find in all of the bitter lessons from the past is that I am not the same person I was back then.
This time, if and ever it happens, I'll never let her leave.
Even if I have to really cage one of my islands and spend the rest of our lives there, I'll do it. Because leaving me is not an option. My universe exists with her.
I managed eleven years without her, and I managed to exist—I won't do it again.
And that's why I want to be the focal point of her life—entirely, just as she's mine. I want her to be just as consumed by me as I am with her so that she never even thinks of existing in a space without my presence.
