" You think to protect Jacques by leaving him here with me as my bodyguard.”
“You see too much.”
“More than you know.” Her eyes softened, warmed. “You think you are going to do something I will be unable to accept, but I believe in you, Mikhail. I think you are a great and fair man. You have every right to despise Romanov, but I know you can put that aside and do what is right. He is a young man, confused and angry, shaken and traumatized by his parents’ brutal deaths. Whatever he found that linked you to those deaths has driven him into a breakdown. It’s a terrible tragedy.”
Mikhail closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. She was effectively tying his hands. How could he go out and kill a man for torturing Raven when she was compassionate enough to forgive him? He bent his head and licked along the closest scar, that fading red/purple shiny strip where the knife had plunged through her precious skin.
“I do not know how to answer you, Raven. I am not nearly the forgiving man you believe me to be. "

― Christine Feehan , Dark Prince (Dark, #1)