Rose POV

Comrade,

I love you.

I've never said those words before. Not to a man. Not to Lissa. Not even to my mother. I've barely even admitted to myself that I love you... yet I know with every fiber of my being that it's true.

I love you.

I love you more than anything.

And I will never be able to tell you that.

We will never be able to be together. It isn't because of our age gap or you being my mentor. It isn't because we're both going to guard Lissa. It's because of who we are. Two guardians can't be involved. Not in our society. Not only is it taboo and highly discouraged, but they would never allow it, no matter who our charges were. They would do everything in their power to keep us apart: reassignments, schedules, etc. The only option would be to leave this all behind us, but that is not an option. It never will be.

If we're not Guardians, then who are we?

We wouldn't be us anymore, Comrade. There's no point in us being together if we're not ourselves... and that brings us back to our problem.

I love you.

I will always love you.

I just had to say it. To write it. To see it in front of me. I have to let you go. They come first. You come first. I know you. Your job, your duty comes before anything else. It's the most important thing in your life and it's one of the many things I love about you.

It's why I have to let you go.

You'd never be happy doing anything else. We're very similar in that regard. I want you to be happy, Dimitri, always remember that.

I love you so much.

That's why I'm going to distance myself from you. It'll be better for both of us in the long run, right? It's what you've been doing all along, isn't it? You never let yourself get close to me in the first place...

I love you and I have no clue how you feel about me. I guess I'll never know. Maybe somewhere in another universe, another dimension, we're together and we're happy. We would have everything we couldn't have here: each other and our purpose in life.

I hope these versions of us exist. One of us deserves that life, and it isn't going to be us. It can't be us. It just isn't in our cards.

I love you, Dimitri Belikov.

I'll never forget that.

Yours forever,

Roza