Hope is a Four Letter Word - Complete

Chapter Eleven

"She's thinking about coming back, but she doesn't want to let Mason down," Adrian mumbled.

"Thinking about it?!" Dimitri asked in shock. That she might choose not to come back hadn't seriously crossed his mind. He was suddenly confronted with the very real prospect of a life without his Roza – and the possibility scared the hell out of him.

"Dimitri, you need to think how bad her mental state must have been that she even considered suicide. That's not going to pass just because you've come back."

They sat in silence for a while.

"I wish she'd known me before," he said, more to himself than Adrian. "If she'd seen me then, she'd know how much I need her. How much she's changed me. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think I started to fall in love with her from the very first day; when I found she and the Princess in Portland. She tried to fight me to protect Lissa. She hadn't trained for two years, and it was a hopeless task, but she tried anyway. She was so fierce and brave. I admired that about her. When we got back to the Academy, they all looked at her, but none of them really saw her."

"And you did?" Adrian asked. It was hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic.

Dimitri shrugged. "I saw more than they did. Enough for me to agree to mentor her."

"Oh, I'm sure that was a hardship... Hot and sweaty in skintight workout clothes." There was no mistaking Adrian's sarcasm this time.

"It wasn't like that."

Adrian raised an eyebrow in contradiction.

"It wasn't," Dimitri maintained. "At first I just wanted to figure her out. Help her if I could. She seemed so tough; that she didn't care what people thought or said about her, but underneath I could see it hurt her and she wanted to prove them wrong. Then I got to know her, and slowly we learned to trust each other, and she opened up to me. It was two steps forward, one step back, though. She'd get me so frustrated!"

"Oh I bet," Adrian said salaciously, the double entendre not able to be misinterpreted.

Dimitri smiled wryly. "Yeah, well, there was that, too," he admitted, blushing a little.

"It must have been a relief when you knew she felt the same way?"

"No. It made it a hundred times worse because we couldn't be together."

"So what changed?"

"Spokane. Tasha. You."

"Me?"

"Seeing another man interested in her. I was trying to fool myself it was just a crush, but the prospect of you, of any other man with Rose, made me see red."

"And Tasha?" Adrian asked curiously.

"Same sort of thing. Tasha made me an offer at Christmas – to be her guardian but also her lover. We could have lived out in the human world - had a family together even. It was an excellent offer, so I considered it, I really did. But no matter how I turned it over in my mind, I couldn't see myself in a relationship with anyone but Rose. I don't want a family unless it is with her."

"You really fucked this up, Belikov."

Dimitri sighed, running his fingers through his hair. "I know it," he moaned.

Rose was fascinated hearing Dimitri speak to Adrian so candidly. She'd never thought about how she'd changed Dimitri. Seeing him openly admit his feelings, and to Adrian of all people, was certainly eye-opening – there was no way he'd have done anything like that before he'd left. It was like he genuinely didn't care what people thought anymore.