From Best Friend To Fiancé (Savannah and Roman) novel Chapter 166

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**TITLE: Dreams Folding Into Broken Time**
**Chapter 166**

“Don’t,” I uttered, the word hanging in the air like a sharp blade, a command that I desperately hoped he would respect. “Don’t you dare twist my decision to stay here, my… whatever this is, into some kind of consent for what you did.” My voice hardened, slicing through the tension that enveloped us. “I am not your justification, Roman. I am not your excuse. I did not agree to have him killed.” My throat constricted painfully. “I never wanted someone to die because of me.”

“You didn’t want to witness him living while you rebuilt your life,” he countered, his eyes unwavering, unblinking. “You didn’t want to stand in a courtroom, watching him smirk at you. You wanted it to end.” There was a softness in his tone that made bile rise in my throat; it felt too much like a lover’s whisper beneath the roar of a tyrant’s wrath. “You just can’t admit that you wanted that bastard dead.”

The world around me began to close in once more. My body, traitorous and foolish, reacted instinctively. This was not the clear line of desire—oh no. It was the twisted remnants of adrenaline coursing through a system already primed for survival. It felt like the instinctual assessment of a predator sizing up its strength. It felt like shame.

God, the shame was a far worse torment than the fear itself.

And then, the other thing happened—the thing I had been grappling with ever since he confessed. My limbs betrayed me. A warmth surged through the hollow of my throat, pooling low and wrong, igniting a fire of confusion. My heart raced, pounding like a war drum, and every nerve ending flared with unwelcome sensation. This was not lust—no, this was something more primal. It was a physiological coup, where trauma and adrenaline blurred the lines between pain and arousal until they became indistinguishable. My body and mind were catastrophically misaligned, leaving me in a blinding haze.

I pressed my knuckles hard against my eyes, hoping to dispel the stars that burst behind my eyelids. I craved an end to this chaos. I longed for clarity, for the simplicity of honest emotions instead of this tangled mess of confusion.

Shame washed over me more forcefully than anything he had said. The realization that a visceral response had flickered through me felt like a bottomless pit I could fall into. It meant that everything he had done had seeped into my very core, deeper than I was willing to acknowledge.

It meant I was not entirely myself.

For a fleeting moment, I imagined confessing this treacherous detail to him—exposing the raw truth of my body’s betrayal—and then envisioned him wielding it like a weapon against me. I recoiled at the thought. I could never tell him. I simply could not. The knowledge of this dirty little secret would act as a leash, binding me to him in ways I was not prepared to accept.

I took a step back, believing that a little distance might grant me the clarity I sought. But it didn’t. The apartment hummed around us, indifferent to our turmoil. The lights glinted off his watch and reflected my lipstick staining the carpet. Outside, the city continued its rhythmic breathing, as if our struggles were inconsequential.