Epilogue - Raze
Izzy had kicked half the blankets off sometime during the night, one arm folded beneath the pillow, her hair fanned across the sheets like a dark halo. The faint light from the balcony doors painted soft lines across her face, catching the curve of her cheek and the slow rise and fall of her chest.
And my hand rested over her stomach.
Even now, months into the pregnancy, I still did it without thinking. A habit that had become instinct. Like some primitive part of my brain had decided the safest place for my hand to exist was right there—guarding the small life growing beneath her skin.
My child.
The word still hit me with a strange mixture of awe and dread every time it surfaced.
Because there had been another life once.
Another woman. Another child that never made it into this world.
The memory didn’t come as often as it used to, but when it did, it hit like a punch to the ribs.
Sometimes it arrived in fragments. The smell of burning. The smell of something lost forever.
Sometimes it came as something worse.
Possibility.
What that life might have looked like if fate hadn’t taken it from me before it had a chance to begin.
I had loved my first wife.
Unwaveringly. In that simple way men do when they believe the future is something solid they can hold in their hands.
And then she was gone.
Both of them were gone.
And the world had taught me a brutal lesson that day.
Nothing is guaranteed or safe. And that nothing lasts unless you fight like hell to keep it.
Which explained why I had become… difficult.
That was the polite word Tone liked to use.
Obsessive was probably more accurate.
Izzy couldn’t leave the estate without two cars shadowing her.
She had security at art school. Security at the grocery store. Security watching the street outside the café she liked near the harbor.
She complained about it often. Said I was suffocating her. Said I was turning her into a prisoner. She wasn’t entirely wrong. But I wasn’t changing it. Not after everything I had already lost.
I had seen too clearly what the world could take away when it decided to be cruel.
I wasn’t letting that happen again. So I built walls around her. Around us. Layers of protection most people would call excessive.
Men on the perimeter. Camera systems that watched every inch of the estate.
A doctor who visited twice a week just to check on her because the thought of something going wrong between appointments made my chest feel like it was being crushed in a vice.
Tone told me I was spiralling.
Atlas told me to calm the hell down.
Even Archie had suggested—very politely—that perhaps I should consider therapy before I gave my unborn child a nervous breakdown from the womb.
They were all wrong. Or maybe they weren’t.
But none of them had been there that night—the night I lost everything I loved.
None of them had learned what it felt like to bury both a wife and a child before either of them had the chance to live.
So I watched. I guarded. I dominated what I could.
And I loved Izzy with a kind of intensity that sometimes frightened even me.
Because she wasn’t just the woman I had fallen for.
She was the one who had dragged me back into the world after I had stopped caring whether I lived in it or not.
I glanced down at her again. At the faint curve beginning to show beneath the fabric of her shirt.
My child was there. Alive. Real. The thought twisted something deep in my chest.
Izzy stirred slightly beneath my hand.
Her eyes opened slowly, still heavy with sleep.
She looked at me for a moment, blinking away the haze.
“You’re doing it again,” she murmured.
Her voice was soft. Amused.
“What?”
“That thing where you stare at me like I might disappear if you blink.”
I huffed softly.
“You might.”
She rolled her eyes and moved onto her side, pressing closer into me.
“I’m pregnant, Raze. Not made of glass.”
“That’s debatable.”
She laughed.
The sound hit me straight in the chest. God, I loved that sound.
Her hand slid over mine where it rested on her stomach, fingers threading through mine.
“Relax. We’re okay.”
We.
That word again.
I looked down at her. At the stubborn spark in her eyes. At the warmth she carried even when the world tried to grind it out of her.
Izzy had walked into my life like a storm and dismantled everything I thought I understood about myself.
I had spent years existing. Functioning. Surviving. But loving someone like this—with this kind of terrifying, consuming certainty—that was something else entirely.
My thumb brushed over the back of her hand.
“You know,” she started, “most people don’t look this intense before breakfast.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” she agreed softly. Her eyes softened. “You’re not.”
Silence settled around us again. But this time it felt warm. Whole.
My hand pressed gently against her stomach.
For a moment I imagined the future stretching out in front of us.
Not as a fragile possibility. But as something solid. Something worth fighting for. And a strange realization settled into my bones.
For years I had believed my life had ended in that driveway.
That the best parts of me had been buried with the people I lost.
But laying here now—with Izzy breathing softly beside me and our child growing beneath my hand—I understood something I hadn’t allowed myself to believe before.
I wasn’t broken and unfinished. Nor was I the man who had lost everything. I was the man who had found something worth living for again.
Izzy repositioned herself closer, her forehead resting lightly against my chest.
“Stop worrying,” she murmured sleepily.
I kissed the top of her head.
“I’ll try.”
It was a lie.
I would never stop worrying. Never stop guarding. Never stop loving her with the kind of ferocity that bordered on madness.
Because she wasn’t just my future. She was the reason I finally felt whole again.
And if the world ever came for her—for them—it would learn very quickly that there was nothing on earth I wouldn’t destroy to keep my family safe.
Thank you for reading Beautiful Ruins! Are you ready for more of Tone Cavalho and Archie Popovich? They’re back in Beautiful Obsessions
Chapter 1: ARCHIE
It would have been so easy to mistake the wine for blood.
The man sitting across from me kept swirling it in his glass without drinking it.
People who come to negotiate drink. People who come to threaten stall.
The restaurant around us hummed with quiet luxury. Low lighting and soft music. Waiters moving noiselessly between tables.
I rested my elbows on the table and studied him.
He had the look of a man who thought he was clever. The type who practiced confidence in the mirror before leaving the house.
His haircut was too precise, the lines around the temples freshly shaved like he’d stopped by a barber an hour before this meeting.
His watch was expensive—very expensive—but the way he angled his wrist when he spoke told me he wanted me to notice it.
His suit was tailored to look effortless, the fabric soft enough to pass for casual luxury while quietly costing more than most people’s annual salary.
Everything about him was rehearsed.
The posture. The smile. Even the way he held his wine glass, fingers carefully placed as though someone had once shown him how powerful men were supposed to drink.
But the performance was thin.
Men who actually owned that kind of wealth didn’t need to advertise it.
They wore their money the way old soldiers wore scars—without ceremony.
This man, however, had built himself a costume.
And I would have bet a very comfortable sum that it was all for show.
Think big. Look big. Convince the world you belonged at the table long enough that no one noticed you didn’t.
I had seen the trick before.
Every city had a handful of men like him—well-rehearsed scammers who survived by pretending they were far more dangerous, connected, or valuable than they actually were.
And the moment he sat down across from me, I knew exactly which category he belonged to.
He was sweating.
Not profusely, but enough to let me know he was nervous and trying not to show it.
Across from me, Atlas Cavalho didn’t bother hiding his boredom.
He leaned back in his chair, one arm draped lazily across the backrest, his expression calm in that dangerous way that made lesser men nervous.
The man cleared his throat.
“So,” he said slowly. “Let’s talk about the situation.”
Ah. There it was.
I lifted my glass and took a slow sip of the wine.
“What situation?” I asked pleasantly.
Atlas’s mouth twitched faintly.
The man glanced between us, calculating.
“Word travels quickly,” he said. “And lately the word traveling is… expensive.”
“Everything is expensive these days,” I replied. “Inflation.”
Atlas snorted quietly.
The man’s smile tightened.
“There’s a bounty on your head,” he said finally.
I set my glass down.
“Yes,” I said calmly. “That.”
Atlas’s eyes slid toward me.
“Two million euros,” he added, as though the number itself might impress me.
It didn’t. I was quite offended, actually, that two million euros was all I was worth to someone.
I leaned back in my chair.
“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s flattering.” Not.
The man blinked in surprise before he spoke again.
“I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation.”
“Oh, I understand it perfectly.”
Two million euros was simple math. It meant someone powerful wanted me dead. Powerful enough to convince every ambitious psychopath in Europe that my head was worth chasing.
Atlas drummed his fingers lightly against the table.
“You should take it seriously,” Atlas said to me, though I could see the twitch in his lip telling me he wanted to put on a show for our guest.
“I am.”
Atlas raised an eyebrow.
“No,” he said calmly. “You’re not.”
He turned to the man.
“Someone will take the job,” Atlas continued. “That’s what a bounty that size guarantees.”
The man nodded eagerly, grateful that he was finally getting his point across.
“Yes. Exactly.”