Chapter 205: The Things Left Unsaid

*Runze’s POV*

"...Just please don’t stop talking to me."

My footsteps come to a halt.

For several long seconds, I stand completely still near the bathroom doorway. His fingers are still wrapped around my wrist.

They are trembling.

I slowly turn around to face him, and the moment I see his face, something in my chest does something I wasn’t prepared for.

This isn’t the worry he wears when I push myself too hard. It isn’t the tight, restrained thing he gets when I’m in pain and he’s trying not to show that it’s affecting him. I know those versions. I’ve catalogued them without meaning to, the way you absorb the small patterns of someone you live beside long enough.

This is different.

His face has gone pale. His breathing is uneven, his chest rising and falling in shallow, erratic hitches. His eyes are already red, desperately searching mine as though he is waiting for me to say something—anything—that will prove I haven’t already checked out mentally, that I haven’t already walked away from him.

For the first time... I truly see it.

Fear. Real, unfiltered fear in Bael’s face.

It should make me feel better. It should give me a sense of relief to see the man who took control of my life looking so vulnerable.

It doesn’t.

Instead... I feel tired. So unbearably tired.

"...Runze..." His voice breaks, raw and fragile.

"I’m sorry."

I don’t answer.

His fingers loosen around my wrist almost immediately, like he’s suddenly afraid that even touching me might push me farther away.

"I’m sorry," he repeats, quieter this time. "I... I really am."

He searches my face, looking for something. Anything.

I give him nothing.

Something inside him visibly caves.

"I wasn’t trying to hurt you," he says quickly. "I know that doesn’t change anything, I know it doesn’t, but... God, Runze, I really wasn’t."

His voice catches.

"I just..." He drags an unsteady hand across his face. "I thought I was protecting you."

Silence.

The room grows so quiet I can hear his breathing.

He swallows hard. Then, almost as if the silence itself becomes too much to bear, the words begin spilling out on their own.

"...I couldn’t sleep after the accident."

His eyes drop to the floor.

"I’d close my eyes, and..." He presses his lips together, as though saying the next words hurts. "Every time I closed them, all I saw was you lying in that hospital bed."

His fingers curl into themselves.

"I kept thinking..." His voice lowers. "...what if you didn’t wake up?"

He stops. For a long moment, he simply stands there staring at the floor. Then he whispers,

"What if I had to go home without you?"

My chest tightens.

"I watched the heart monitor every night," he continues, his eyes wet. "I sat in that chair until my back burned, just staring at the lines on the screen. I kept asking the doctors the same questions over and over until they were sick of answering me. They kept telling me to let you rest, they kept saying stress would only make your recovery harder."

His lips tremble slightly, a sight I have never seen on a man as strong as Bael.

"So when we came home and they told me complete rest..." He pauses, swallowing hard. "I held onto those words. I treated them like..." His voice drops into a flat, deadly quiet, stripped of all color. "...like a promise. Like they were the only thing keeping you alive."

He finally lowers his head, unable to maintain eye contact.

"I know it sounds ridiculous."

"...It doesn’t," I answer softly.

He looks up in surprise, his reddish eyes widening slightly.

"It sounds human."

Hope flickers across his face so quickly it almost hurts to watch. It is the desperate hope of a man grasping at any lifeline thrown his way.

I take a slow, deliberate breath, steadying the knot in my stomach.

"I believe you."

His shoulders visibly relax, dropping as if a massive weight was suddenly lifted off him.

"But..." My voice grows quieter, firmer. "...it still hurts."

The relief vanishes from his face instantly.

"I know," he stammers out quickly.

"No." I shake my head gently. "I don’t think you do."

His lips part, but no words come out.

"I’m not angry because you were scared... I would’ve been scared too. If it had been you lying in that hospital bed..." My voice softens. "...I don’t even know what I would’ve done. So I believe you were scared."

Silence.

"But being scared..." I pause. "...doesn’t mean I stop being me."

His expression shifts.

"My work is the one thing in all of this that belongs to me." My fingers tighten slightly against my sleeve. "Not to this house, not to this marriage, not to the Wuchen name. Just... me."

His lips part.

"And you made a decision about it," I say quietly. "Without asking me."

He opens his mouth immediately. "I was going to —" He stops.

The sentence dies right there, unfinished, and I watch him hear it. Watch him understand what he was about to say and what it would have sounded like.

*I was going to tell you.*

When? The question sits between us without either of us saying it out loud.

His mouth closes.

Something shifts in his expression... not guilt exactly. Something quieter and more uncomfortable than guilt. The particular look of a person confronting a version of themselves they didn’t know existed until just now.

The silence stretches.

"When did you stop trusting me with my own life?"

My voice comes out softer than I expected. It isn’t an accusation. It’s an honest question, and underneath it... the thing I actually need to know. The thing that has been sitting at the bottom of all of this since I opened that inbox this afternoon and counted to fifty-eight.

Bael goes very still.

He doesn’t answer right away. And the longer the silence holds, the more I understand that there isn’t a clean answer coming. His mouth opens slightly. Closes. His jaw tightens once before it releases.

"I never stopped," he says.

Then, quieter — like he’s only now hearing himself:

"I don’t know."

He squeezes his eyes shut briefly.

"I didn’t think about it that way. I wasn’t thinking... I wasn’t thinking about what it meant. I just knew I couldn’t —" He exhales, rough and uneven. "I couldn’t let anything touch you. I couldn’t let the outside world reach you while you were still —"

He stops again.

Runs a hand through his hair.

"I thought I was keeping you safe," he says. "That’s all I thought."

I look at him for a long moment.

"But you never gave me the chance to decide for myself."

The words land quietly. He doesn’t flinch from them, he takes them, stands there and takes them, and that’s almost harder to watch than if he’d argued.

"I know," he says. Low. Stripped of everything.

"I know you love me." My voice is steady. "I’ve never doubted that. Not once." I pause. "But loving me shouldn’t mean deciding who I get to be."

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, he just stands there, eyes red.

"I’m sorry," he says.

Nothing else. No explanation attached to it, no defense trailing behind it.

Just that.

And somehow the simplicity of it... no strategy, no reasoning, just Bael standing in front of me with nothing left to hide behind, is what finally makes my throat tighten.

I take a slow breath.

"I know."

I mean it. That’s the terrible, complicated truth of all of this — I know he’s sorry, I know he means it, I know the fear that drove him to do it was real. I know all of it and it still sits in my chest like something I need to carry by myself for a little while before I can set it down.

"I’m not going to ignore you," I say.

His eyes come up immediately.

"I’m not going to move downstairs. I’m not going to stop talking to you." I hold his gaze. "...but I need time to heal from this."

Something moves across his face. Relief and sorrow arriving at exactly the same moment, neither one winning.

Carefully... I lift his hand from my wrist. One finger at a time, I peel his trembling grip away from my skin.

His hand falls slowly back to his side, empty now, but he doesn’t reach for me again. He just stands there, looking at me like he knows he has no right to ask for anything else.

"I love you," I say quietly. The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. "That never changed."

His breath catches. For a second, it looks like he wants to say something. His lips part, nothing comes out.

"But right now..." I force myself to meet his eyes one last time. "...I don’t know how to stop hurting."

I see it then. Not relief or panic.

Heartbreak.

The kind that comes when you finally understand exactly how deeply you’ve wounded someone... and realize there isn’t a single thing you can do to take it back.

I turn before I lose the strength to. I step into the bathroom and close the door behind me. The quiet click of the latch sounds impossibly loud.

I lean back against the door and close my eyes.

Outside... I know he’s still standing there. I know he hasn’t moved.

And somehow...

Knowing that hurts almost as much as everything else.