8. Declan
DECLAN
The house is silent when I wake. Not peaceful—silent.
There's a difference that anyone who's lived alone in a space built for a family would understand.
Every footstep echoes. Every door closing sounds like a gunshot.
The emptiness has weight, substance, like something living that fills all the unused rooms and presses against my chest until breathing becomes a deliberate act.
I bought this place three months after Zola left.
Couldn't stay in the old house where her coffee mug still sat in the cabinet, where her shampoo bottle remained in the shower because I couldn't bring myself to throw it away, where every corner held some ghost of her.
The couch where she'd curl up with textbooks.
The kitchen where I'd learned to cook just to make sure she ate.
The bed where she'd sleep pressed against my side like she was afraid I'd disappear.
But I never sold it either. Just locked the door and left everything exactly as it was, like some pathetic shrine to what I'd destroyed by being exactly who I was—a man whose last name meant she could never have a normal life.
This house is massive. Six bedrooms, formal dining room, library with floor-to-ceiling shelves that remain mostly empty because I don't read like she did.
There's a garden I've never stepped foot in, a pool I've never swam in, rooms I've never even opened the doors to.
I bought it because Stellan's place is two streets over, because the property value made it a solid investment, because I needed somewhere to exist that didn't smell like her vanilla body wash or echo with her laugh.
I dress in the dark out of habit, pulling on slacks and a button-down without bothering to turn on lights.
My closet is organized with military precision—suits arranged by color, shirts pressed and hung exactly one inch apart, shoes lined up like soldiers.
Everything has its place. Everything is controlled.
It's the only way I know how to function anymore.
The face in the bathroom mirror is mine but also not.
Same strong jaw, same heavy brows, same dark green eyes that used to soften when they looked at her.
But there's something flat behind them now, something cold that settled in the day I read her letter and realized I'd lost the only thing that mattered.
We're trying to force something that was never going to fit.
I still have that letter. Keep it in my desk drawer underneath files about shipments and territory disputes, the edges worn soft from how many times I've unfolded it, trying to find some hidden message I might have missed.
Some clue that would tell me how to fix what she broke when she decided my future was more important than our present.
Eight years. She stayed gone for eight years, and I did the one thing she asked me to do.
Never called. Never sent anyone looking.
Told everyone who worked for me that if they saw her, I didn't want to know.
Not where she was living, not who she was with, nothing.
She asked me for one thing in all the time we were together—asked me not to come after her—and I couldn't ignore it no matter how much it destroyed me.
She never asked for anything before that.
Not money when I knew her bank account was in the negatives.
Not help when she was working three jobs and taking a full course load.
Not comfort when her mother died and she locked herself in the bathroom and cried so hard I thought she'd break ribs.
She carried everything alone because asking for help meant depending on someone, and depending on someone meant they could leave.
So when she finally asked me for something, I had to give it to her. Even if it meant bleeding out slowly. Even if it meant becoming this hollow thing wearing my skin.
I shake it off, and move. We have a meeting at nine with the dock foreman, another at eleven about territory disputes in Kensington.
The family business doesn't stop just because I'm empty inside.
In some ways, it's easier now. I don't hesitate anymore when decisions need to be made.
Don't second-guess when someone needs to be handled.
Used to be I'd think about Zola, about what she'd say if she knew what I did, and it would stay my hand sometimes.
Not anymore. Now there's just the work, the endless parade of problems and solutions, violence and negotiation, all of it washing over me without leaving a mark.
I head downstairs, each footstep too loud in the cavernous entryway.
The kitchen is pristine because I barely use it.
Learned to cook for her, spent hours perfecting recipes just to watch her eat, to know I was taking care of her in some small way.
Now I survive on coffee and whatever Stellan's housekeeper leaves in his fridge when I eat there.
Which is most nights, because this house is a mausoleum and Stellan's place at least has the illusion of life.
The garage holds six cars, all of them expensive, all of them meaningless. I take the black Mercedes because it's closest, pulling out into the gray Philadelphia morning. It's June but you wouldn't know it—overcast and humid, the kind of weather that sits heavy on your shoulders.
Stellan's house is only minutes away, a sprawling modern thing with too much glass and not enough curtains.
I let myself in through the front door that's keyed into my biometrics—a scanner I insisted on him having.
My brother lives like he has no care in the world, like the family business is just a hobby he dabbles in rather than the machine that runs our lives.
The living room looks like a bomb went off.
Empty bottles on the coffee table, someone's bra draped over a lamp, Stellan himself passed out face-down on the leather couch with one arm trailing to the floor.
He's wearing boxer briefs and nothing else, his dark hair sticking up in seventeen different directions.
He's different than when he was younger. Now, he doesn't give a shit about anything.
I cross the room and kick the couch hard enough to rattle his teeth. "Get up."
He doesn't move. Dead asleep or playing dead—with Stellan it's impossible to tell.
I kick again, harder this time, then grab his shoulder and shove him off the couch entirely. He hits the floor with a satisfying thud, finally jolting awake with a string of curses that would make a sailor proud.
"What the fuck, Dec?" He glares up at me, steel gray eyes still bleary with sleep. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Eight-thirty."
"Exactly. Ungodly." He scrubs a hand over his face, squinting against the light filtering through those ridiculous floor-to-ceiling windows. "Just because you're a miserable bastard doesn't mean the rest of us have to be."
The words should sting. Probably would have eight years ago when I still had enough humanity left to feel offended. Now they just slide off like water. "Let's go."
I turn and head for the door without waiting to see if he follows. Behind me, I hear him groaning, stumbling to his feet, muttering things about tyrannical brothers and the value of sleep. The door opens and closes. The Mercedes beeps as I unlock it.
We have meetings to attend. Territory to manage.
Problems to solve with either negotiation or violence, depending on what the situation requires.
The family needs a leader now that Uncle Vittorio is gone—died a little over a year ago, his heart finally giving out after years of scotch and cigars and carrying the weight of our world on his shoulders.
I agreed to everything on his deathbed. Stood there watching him fade, this man who raised Stellan and me after our parents died, who taught us the business and the code and how to survive in a world that eats the weak.
His hand was cold in mine, his breathing shallow, and all he wanted to know was whether I'd do my duty.
"The Morelli girl," he'd rasped. "Bianca. You'll marry her."
"Uncle—"
"You'll marry her and you'll produce heirs and you'll stop this pathetic mourning over a woman who left you.
" His grip tightened with surprising strength.
"The family needs legitimate succession.
Needs alliances with the Italians. You'll do this, Declan.
You'll do it or everything I built dies with me. "
So I agreed. Stood there and watched the light fade from his eyes and felt nothing, absolutely nothing, because I'd already given away every part of myself that knew how to feel years prior.
The wedding was six months ago. Small ceremony, no real celebration, just the necessary witnesses and Bianca in an expensive dress looking at me like I was something she'd stepped in.
The marriage was purely transactional—everyone knew it, no one pretended otherwise.
She got the Wolfe name and all the power that came with it.
I got the alliance her father wanted and Uncle Vittorio's dying wish fulfilled.
But I won't touch her. Can't. The thought of it makes my skin crawl, makes something violent twist in my gut.
She's beautiful in that glossy magazine way, all polished surfaces and expensive maintenance, but she's not her.
She doesn't have amber eyes that could cut through my bullshit.
Doesn't have sharp wit that kept me on my toes.
Doesn't smell like vanilla and coffee and home.
On the outside, we are everything we are supposed to be. But our marriage is a piece of paper. It's not even something I pretend is real.
Bianca sleeps down the hall in the room that should be mine too, and I'm grateful for every foot of distance between us.
She fills the house with her presence—her expensive perfume in every room, her designer clothes draped over furniture, her shrill voice on the phone complaining to her friends about how her husband won't even look at her and gossiping about the hot waiter at lunch.
She grates on every nerve I have left. The way she picks at her food like eating is some kind of personal failure.
The way she spends money on things she doesn't need while people on our payroll struggle to make ends meet.
The way she looks at me with barely concealed disgust, like I'm the one who trapped her in this arrangement instead of it being exactly what she signed up for.
I left before having to see her this morning. Couldn't stomach the thought of watching her push egg whites around a plate while scrolling through Instagram, documenting her miserable life married to a man who can't stand her. She makes everything harder just by existing in my space.
Stellan finally emerges from his house wearing jeans and a t-shirt, sunglasses covering his eyes despite the overcast sky. He slides into the passenger seat and immediately starts messing with my radio, switching from NPR to some hip-hop station that makes my head hurt.
"You look like shit," he says conversationally.
"You're one to talk."
"Yeah, but I look like shit because I had a fantastic time last night. You look like shit because you're dead inside." He turns to look at me, those gray eyes too knowing even behind dark lenses. "There's a difference."
I pull out of his driveway without responding, navigating the streets on autopilot.
We've had this conversation before in various forms. Stellan pushing me to feel something, anything.
Me refusing to engage because what's the point?
The only thing I ever wanted walked away eight years ago, and I've been running on fumes ever since.
Deep down, in places I don't examine too closely, I'm just waiting for it to end.
Waiting for someone to finally put a bullet through my skull and end this grinding existence where every day is exactly like the last. Where I wake up in an empty house and go through the motions and return to an empty house, over and over, an endless loop of nothing.
Sometimes I think about doing it myself.
Late at night when the silence gets too heavy and sleep won't come, I think about the gun in my nightstand and how easy it would be.
One pull of the trigger and no more emptiness, no more watching Stellan live the life I should be living, no more lying next to a woman I can't touch while remembering the one I couldn't keep.
But I don't. Not because I'm brave or because I have some moral objection, but because Uncle Vittorio made me promise. Made me swear on his deathbed that I'd lead this family, that I'd hold everything together, that I'd give him heirs to carry on the name.
So I stay. I breathe. I move through days that all blur together into one long stretch of gray.
And I try not to think about amber eyes and vanilla body wash and the way she used to say my name like it meant something.