Finding Him

C H A P T E R - N I N E T E E N

Doing It All for Love

V A L E R I U S '    P O V :

Love is not a simple word for me.

I've been exploited, used, betrayed. All for love.

I've grown a lot form the man who used to believe he needed to please people to buy their love. I used to believe I had to work for it, I had to ask for it.

Ellie changed that for me.

My daughter, my girl. My world.

Her sole existence proved to me that I didn't have to change myself to be deserving of love. I just simply had to be me and she loved that.

Bianca Armani was my mother. A woman who was supposed to love me willingly, supposed to care for me in a way no more than maternal. Though, she did not. She broke all the rules set in stone. She did not care for me, she did not love me, she did not listen to me and she especially did not see me as a son.

To Bianca, I was always a toy. A pawn in her game. I was the pawn and she was the king. She always won the game. No matter how difficult.

She used me like I was nothing. Used me for her pleasure, her needs, her own gain. And I didn't even see the wrong because she had told me it was so right. She fucked me over from the start. She was the reason for my self destruction. She was the reason I hated my family, my life. She told me no one could love me like she loved me. And if that was what love was supposed to feel like, I didn't want it. I made everyone hate me because I hated what being loved felt like. She ruined me.

That was before I met Katerina Watson.

Katerina showed me a different side to love. She wasn't gentle like Bianca. She was rough, a diamond so thick, it couldn't break.

I thought I had found my escape. I thought she couldn't hurt me like Bianca did. I thought it was different.

Bianca used to wipe my tears when I asked her to stop. She would caress me like I was the softest silk made for touching. I was a baby bird just born in a falcon's nest. She forced me to be so sensitive, that I became just the opposite when I found Katerina.

I knew Katerina was tough from the start. What I didn't know though was that she used her strength as a shield to mask the angry, emotional girl she always truly was.

She had a temper. She threw fits. She screamed and cried. Then she'd blame it on me because she was too sensitive to understand that she was the problem, not me.

It look ten years for me to look at myself in the mirror and see all the wrongs I once believe were a right. All the pain I endured for a simple feeling. A simple want.

A feeling that I didn't even know the true meaning of. I was chasing something I never had felt before. Longing for a memory that wasn't real.

I did not know love. I only knew how to want love.

I sacrificed years for a simple feeling. An emotion.

Katerina Watson hit me. She used me. She left me. But she had once claimed to love me.. and that was enough for me to stay. I was desperate. So desperate.

Now, I am not.

Now, I will never know if Katerina truly did love me and she was just too damaged to show it or if she really did have poor intentions. I will never know because she is dead. Killed by my enemy. Killed by a Russian. Ivan Moscow.

I wish things could have been different. I wish I hadn't been so weak. But the past doesn't change.

A part of me will always long for Katerina. Not her, but the idea of what I could have had. The idea that I could have a family with Ellie. But I have to remind myself, Ellie is enough. We are enough together.