Dominic POV
For reasons I couldn’t fully name, the moment I truly saw her eyes—how bruised her soul was, they looked destroyed, how tired—they made my chest ache in a way no wound ever had.
That pain didn’t belong to today alone. It was layered. Old. The kind that came from surviving things she never should have had to endure, things she never chose. And the realization that my attempts to help—however well-intended—might have added to that weight made my stomach twist with regret.
I hadn’t meant to corner her.
I had meant to show her she wasn’t alone.
But there is a difference between support and pressure, and I was starting to understand how easily one can masquerade as the other.
I had read what women gravitated toward these days. Romance novels. Stories soaked in fantasy—men who
