Chapter 41 Estella #2
The largest room in the house.
A stone fireplace anchors the far wall, cold and empty, like a mouth that hasn’t spoken in centuries.
In the center, a canopy bed rises like a monument, its gauze fluttering faintly with the ghost of a breeze.
Beside the window, a wooden chair stands rigidly, a sentinel to the night.
Against the wall, a dresser holds a cracked mirror half-shrouded by a sheet of fabric, hiding the jagged reflection beneath.
I don’t believe in curses.
But fuck that mirror.
I collapse onto the bed with a heavy exhale, my lungs filling with the faint scent of caramel. When I bought this mansion, everything smelled like damp lavender, dust, and the residue of rain. It took weeks to chase those smells out and replace them with something that felt like mine.
I close my eyes, hoping exhaustion will drag me away from myself—but instead, the thoughts claw their way in. They press against the backs of my eyelids, loud and relentless.
Tears slip free before I even realize it, sliding down my cheeks. My face twists—a humiliating crack in the armor—before a small, broken sound leaves my throat.
Maybe I stopped drinking too soon.
No matter how many distractions I force into my days, my mind always circles back to Dante.
It’s impossible to forget him—the deep, bottomless voice that crawls under my skin, the perfect face carved in sharp lines, the body mapped with scars, the trauma he carried like a second spine.
He became dear to me, unbearably real, painfully mine, and in the end, it all turned into something so fucking ugly.
I tried to stay angry at him. The universe knows I tried. But my stupid fucking brain keeps digging up new excuses for his choices, new angles that soften the cracks he split open.
Yes, he’s undeniably a lying asshole—but at least he admitted it. And since then, he’s done nothing except give me time and space, watching over me from a distance like some silent guardian I never asked for.
I don’t even want to mention the spider lilies that appear everywhere I go. Every time I wake up or come home, they’re waiting, blooming like a warning or a confession. At first, rage took over. I grabbed scissors and cut every single one of them to shreds, knowing he’d see it.
But his stubborn ass refused to take the hint, and eventually, I stopped. I just accepted that he’ll keep reminding me of himself, reminding me that he loves every jagged part of me until the day I fucking die.
But the flowers are just the tip of the iceberg.
He also sends me clothes, trinkets, new perfumes made specifically for me—all sorts of things.
And as much as I’d like to remain stone-cold and indifferent, I can’t.
I wear his clothes, dressing up in them whether I’m on a mission or simply at home, watching a movie.
Once, he even tracked down James and ordered an assassination on himself—just to force me to talk. I didn’t take the bait, and the realization only pushed me deeper into that familiar spiral: he would do absolutely anything for me, and that truth is as suffocating as it is fucking devastating.
I keep thinking about where he sleeps now, what spirals through his head, how he handles the weight of his own thoughts. When I left, he was at his most vulnerable—more cracked than I’d ever seen him.
And there’s always been that gnawing sense of guilt inside me, the voice whispering in the back of my mind. I helped him uncover what really happened to him, and the truth was brutal. It shattered him. It killed the last fragile illusion he’d been living under for years.
I was his only anchor. And I left.
And the worst fucking part is that I knew it. I walked away to hurt him as much as he hurt me. That’s what I do, I bite back—harder, longer, out of instinctive defense.
But now, a whole year later, I wish I could rewind everything.
I wish I hadn’t been so emotional, so desperate to wound him.
Because he proved his love in ways no sane person ever would.
He killed his friends. He burned his world to the ground for me.
He kept coming after me, even when I left, even when I drowned myself in alcohol and drugs, trying to forget him.
I think about it every day.
About his loyalty. About the way he understood me. About the trauma we share like a scarred bond stitched under the skin.
My body finally begins to loosen as the bitter memories fade into fantasies. I drift into them sometimes—imagining the places we could go, the things we could do. Traveling without him feels pointless, as empty as the space inside me now that he’s gone.
And as sleep pulls me under, the dreams twist into something I hold close, something tender, as a tiny sparkle of hope blooms in the distance, growing stronger with every passing day.
The faint crack of the chair pulls me from the edges of sleep as I shift, the soft silk of the sheets whispering against my skin.
My body is heavy, my mind drifting somewhere far from consciousness, yet even in that dim, half-drowned place, tears gather at the corners of my eyes as the realization washes over me.
He always tucks me into bed when I collapse without bothering to place my head on the pillow or pull a blanket over myself.
Another crack splits the quiet, and a small gasp slips out of me, followed by words that escape before I can stop them. “Stay.”
He freezes.
I force my sleep-drenched eyes open, blinking against the weight dragging at my eyelids. A silhouette shapes itself through the blur, drawing closer with every slow beat of my heart. Pushing onto my palms, I sit up, and he mirrors me. The sheets rustle softly as he settles on the edge of the bed.
I breathe in, letting his scent fill me. Something inside me flickers back to life, faint but fierce, and my bottom lip trembles between my teeth as a tear breaks free, sliding hot and mournful down my cheek.
That scent… It’s mine. Something I’ve held so close, something I never believed I could have.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he whispers, guilt threading through his voice. A guilt that reaches far deeper than this moment.
“I don’t remember the last time you didn’t break into my house,” I murmur, bitterness slipping into my tone before I can stop it. I’m not even angry—but something inside me tilts the blade anyway, pushing my words into a sharp edge.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, uncertain for once.
“No.”
My gaze finally finds his face. Moonlight cuts across it, pale and cold, gliding over the exhaustion carved into his features. I can feel the weight he carries—see how it drags at him, pulling the life from his eyes.
Still, he waits. Patient. Unmoving. Waiting for my verdict.
If I didn’t want him here, I would’ve already caught him off guard and killed him.
But I let him watch.
I always have.
Even after all this time, that familiar thrill coils in me—the knowledge that he’s here, lurking in the shadows, waiting for me, watching me.
I’m afraid that feeling will never leave me.
“I need you, Estella,” he says, his words unraveling the stillness between us.
The sweetness of them strikes me like a blow.
A sob claws up my throat, and though I try to swallow it down, a choked sound escapes anyway, making him shift closer, his dark eyes locked on mine.
“You are the air I breathe. The beat of my heart. I can’t live without you. ”
“You—” I start, the word tearing itself out of me. I slap my hands over my eyes, angrily smearing the tears away. “You betrayed me, Dante. You lied to me. And then you stalked me afterward.”
“And you shot me,” he says softly. “And stabbed me.”
He’s not wrong. My teeth catch my bottom lip again, desperation growing sharp and feral beneath my skin.
A part of me wants to slap him hard. But knowing him, the sick bastard would only enjoy it.
“You’re the one who met me in my shadows and held them without fear,” he continues, voice steady but trembling underneath.
“You’re the one who saw a complete person where I only saw fragments.
You’re the one who taught me love—the kind that gathers every twisted, jagged piece and treats them like something worth worship. ”
I pause briefly, feeling the tenderness of his words fill the gaping cracks inside me. “And you don’t want me to have anything that isn’t you,” I say.
He nods, throat tight, owning the twisted truth that sparks something dangerous inside me. “No. I don’t,” he breathes. “And I never will. My obsession with you isn’t something I can kill. You’re carved too deeply into me, Estella. I can’t exist without you.”
I close my eyes, letting his confession coil around me. This man—who once painted my world in color and then ripped it all away—sits beside me again, restoring everything to the place where it began.
I’ll never find another like him. I don’t want to. Everything I understand about love is written in him.
“I feel so lonely without you,” I confess. “No matter how much time I spend trying to convince myself I don’t need you… It all circles back to the same place.”
He goes still because for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, I’m not pushing him away. I’m not running. I’m not burying myself in knives and poison and silence.
He moves an inch closer, and the bitter, defiant voice inside me finally goes quiet when his arms wrap around me. A warmth I’ve been starving for.
And then I break.
Slowly. Painfully. Completely.
He strips me of every last defense, peeling back the armor I built from anger and guilt, leaving me bare in his hands as I drown in the echo of his suffering.
I don’t remember shifting closer; I only realize it the moment I’m suddenly buried deeper in his embrace, letting him hold me tight enough to keep the world from collapsing.
The pieces of us fall like shattered glass around the room, a waterfall of grief and longing as we cling to each other.