Chapter 30
ADELINA
I didn’t want him to fall asleep. I kept thinking to myself, what if he didn’t wake up again? He was exhausted, and the meds were dragging him down. I still tried my best to keep him up for as long as I could. Eventually, when I looked at him again, he was out.
Carefully, I slipped off the bed. There were things to handle on my laptop, maybe sneak in a quick shower. I kept the door open so I could still see him. When I came back, I noticed he was having a nightmare.
No thrashing, no violent jerks—just silent tears tracking down his cheeks. His lips moved, barely forming the words I am so sorry.
I understood the nightmares. Half the time, I couldn’t sleep either. The screams still echoed in my skull—memories of the things I didn’t see. Sometimes I wondered if witnessing it all myself would’ve hurt less.
I opened the window, and a cool breeze came in. It felt nice, reminding me of that night in the garden with Cezar. My thoughts kept circling back to him. I needed to face whatever this was head-on. I just didn’t think I was ready to.
We still had a few more days in the hospital ahead of us. Before he woke up again, I planned to have everything in order for when the doctor cleared him. I needed the house set up and his physical therapy appointments organized. There were a lot of them.
It pushed my own plans back a bit, but it was fine. The more time I spent with him, the less all the things I’d built my life around mattered.
I wasn’t stopping anything. I wasn’t changing who I was or why I did what I did. I just… wanted to make it past the end. Not just to it. And for the first time in a long time, something after the revenge didn’t feel impossible. All because of the man lying in that bed.
Even though he said things don’t have to be complicated, they were. We couldn’t outrun the messes we were born into or pretend they weren’t waiting for us.
My phone buzzed. It was Dorin. “We found him.”
My pulse jumped. Images of all the ways I could end the person who nearly put the man I cared about deeply in the ground flashed before me. With Cezar getting shot and everything spiraling sideways, stragglers had scattered during the chaos.
Dorin and a few of the other guys were able to locate and take care of most. But that one? That one was mine. It had been a long time since torture was the only motivation.