Chapter Two #2
“And he was my father.” My voice falters, catching painfully. “The man who taught me how to ride a bike. . . the man who took me to buy princess dresses. . . the man who was there when he could.”
When he could.
I step closer to the coffin. My heels sink slightly into the wet earth. My legs tremble beneath me, threatening to give out. I reach forward, and my fingertips brush the polished wood. It’s smooth. Cold. Final.
“I will always love you, Dad.”
The confession fractures something inside my chest. A sob rips free before I can stop it, raw and ugly and completely unrestrained. My shoulders shake. The grief I’ve been holding like a weapon finally slips from my grip and turns on me, carving through everything I tried to contain.
He was flawed. He was distant. Some days he was cruel in ways that left quiet bruises. Most days he was absent.
But he was still my father.
And now he’s gone.
Sienna is there before I realize I’m falling. Her arms wrap around me, pulling me back from the coffin as my body trembles violently. Two bodyguards step in, subtle but firm, guiding us toward a quieter corner of the cemetery.
But I turn.
I have to.
I watch as the coffin lowers further into the ground, disappearing inch by inch. White swallowed by dark soil. By earth. By inevitability.
My heart splinters all over again.
He’s gone.
This is real.
The first shovel of dirt hits the lid with a dull, final sound. Then another. And another. Flowers slide, petals crushed beneath falling soil. Words spoken minutes ago dissolve into nothing.
Just like that, people begin to move. Conversations resume in hushed tones. Black umbrellas shift. Important men check their watches. They drift back toward waiting cars and political conversations, toward power and strategy and optics.
Not one of them looks back at the earth swallowing him whole.
“Do you want to leave?” Kylie asks softly. Her eyes are red, her cheeks damp, but she still tries to smile for me.
“Yes.” My voice breaks again. “Please. The team can finish the rest. I can’t stay here any longer.”
“Of course,” Sienna says immediately, guiding us toward the car. “We’ll go to my place.”
I nod, wiping at my face, forcing myself to breathe evenly. One step. Then another.
But we don’t get far.
Three figures move into our path, blocking it completely.
Lorenzo.
Andres.
Lev.
A wall of black suits and solid muscle. Controlled power radiating off them like heat.
My stomach drops to my feet.
Of course they wouldn’t let me leave without facing them.
Lorenzo’s face hits me like a physical blow; familiar, intimate, and unbearably painful.
He looks exhausted. There are dark circles carved beneath his eyes, his hair slightly disheveled as if he’s run his hands through it too many times, his jaw locked so tight it seems like it might crack. He looks like a man who hasn’t slept since that night. Like a man carrying something heavy.
Like a man who is grieving.
But I don’t care.
I don’t care how haunted he looks. I don’t care if guilt is eating him alive. He pulled the trigger. He shattered my world with his own hands. He doesn’t get to look broken when I’m the one in pieces.
The air between us thickens, charged and suffocating.
Sienna steps forward before I can react, placing herself slightly in front of me. Her voice cuts through the tension, sharp as a blade. “Are you lost or what?”
“Relax,” Andres replies smoothly, his tone deceptively calm. “You’d know if we were a problem.”
Lev’s lips curl into a lazy smirk. “If anything, she’s the one we need protection from.”
Sienna’s glare could incinerate all three of them where they stand.
Then Lorenzo speaks.
His voice is low. Rough. Stripped of its usual iron control.
“Condolences,” he says, looking only at me. “And I’m sorry.”
The apology lands harder than any insult could have. My chest tightens painfully, something twisting deep inside. I want to scream at him. I want to claw at his face. I want to collapse into him and demand he undo what he’s done.
He takes a step forward.
I step back.
“Take another step,” Sienna warns, her tone pure ice, “and this time there won’t be a demonstration. There will be action.”
Kylie blinks beside us, clearly lost, her gaze darting between us with confusion and growing fear.
“Give them space,” Lev says calmly. “She can speak for herself.”
“You’re not allowed here,” Sienna snaps. “Didn’t you hear me the first time?”
Andres moves closer to her, invading her space deliberately. He towers over her, expression hardening. “Looks like you have zero survival instincts, darling,” he murmurs. “Now move and give them space.”
The threat beneath his words is unmistakable.
For a fraction of a second, Sienna’s bravado flickers. Her eyes widen, just slightly.
Voices rise. Words overlap. Sharp, heated retorts fly back and forth. Two full minutes of tension crackling like live wires ready to snap.
But none of it truly reaches me.
Because Lorenzo never looks away.
Not once.
Even when Lev grips Sienna’s arm and pulls her back, gentle enough to avoid a scene, firm enough to make his point. Even when Andres guides Kylie aside with unsettling ease, removing her from the line of fire.
Lorenzo is still there.
Still watching me.
“Come back to me, love.” The words slice clean through my ribs.
I forget how to breathe. It feels like the air has been stolen from my lungs, like someone pressed a hand against my chest and squeezed.
He steps closer.
I flinch.
Not because I’m afraid of him.
But because my heart can’t survive another fracture. I lost my father and the man I loved on the same day, and the cruelest part is that they are the same wound.
“It hurts,” I whisper.
The words barely make it past my lips, dissolving in the space between us.
He closes the distance anyway.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and there is something dangerously close to desperation in his voice. “Tell me. . . tell me what I have to do for you to forgive me.”
He’s right in front of me now. Close enough that I can feel his warmth through the cold air. Close enough that I can smell him, faint cologne, rain, something achingly familiar.
I look anywhere but at him. The soaked grass at our feet. The mud clinging to my heels. The polished black shoes of strangers walking away.
Anywhere but those blue eyes.
But Lorenzo has never allowed me to escape him.
His fingers slide beneath my chin, gentle, too gentle for hands that have ended lives. He tilts my face up toward his.
I try to pull back.
My body refuses.
Tears spill freely now, hot and relentless against my chilled skin. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop the way my chest heaves. I can’t stop the part of me that still reacts to him.
He looks at me like I’m oxygen.
Like I’m the only thing keeping him alive.
And that might be the cruelest thing of all.
“Tell me what you want,” he growls, his voice cracking under the weight of something too big to contain. “Say it. Anything.”
He drags a hand through his hair, pacing a step closer, eyes wild; like he’s standing on the edge of something catastrophic. “You want an island? I’ll fucking buy you an island.”
His chest rises and falls unevenly. Rain darkens his suit, slicks his hair against his forehead, but he doesn’t seem to feel it.
“You want everything this world can offer?” he presses, desperation bleeding through every syllable. “I’ll put it at your feet. All of it. Every damn thing.”
He’s shaking, not from weakness, but from the violence of holding himself together.
“You want the moon? The sun?” His voice splinters further, raw and stripped of pride.
“Pluto? Something no one can reach, no one can touch?” A fractured sound escapes him, somewhere between a bitter laugh and the breaking of a man.
“I don’t care how impossible it sounds. I don’t care what it takes, who I have to fight, what I have to destroy.
If it exists, if it’s out there, I’ll find a way to put it in your hands. ”
He steps closer. Slow. Dangerous. Pleading.
“Everything you want. . . everything you even breathe about. . .” His voice drops into something rough, wrecked. “I will give it to you.”
Then, quieter. Devastated.
“Just come back to me.”
The rawness in his tone is a blade sliding between my ribs.
Part of me wants to collapse into him. To let his arms close around me. To pretend that the same hands that ended my father’s life could somehow shield me from the pain of losing him.
Part of me wants to scream until the entire cemetery hears the truth.
All of me wants to run.
I finally look at him, really look. Past the power. Past the rage. Past the dominance that usually defines him.
And something inside me shatters.
I cannot breathe in the same city as this man.
I cannot heal while he stands this close.
I cannot survive the gravity that keeps dragging me back to him.
I shove his hand away, hard enough to make it clear, and I run.
“Serena!” His voice rips through the rain, jagged and unsteady.
I don’t look back.
I throw myself into the car, nearly tripping over the hem of my dress, and slam the door so violently the sound echoes. “Help!” I shout, my voice breaking apart.
The bodyguards react instantly, forming a barrier as Lorenzo lunges forward. His composure detonates.
He swings at the first man, fist connecting with a sickening crack. Then the second. Then the third. They grab him, restrain him, but he fights like something feral, like a man being dragged away from the only thing anchoring him to this world.
Andres rushes in, shouting something sharp and urgent. Lev’s expression is dark, calculating, but even he looks shaken. Kylie stands frozen for a second before Sienna pulls her back, both of them staring at the chaos unfolding in the rain.
“Drive!” I scream.
The driver doesn’t hesitate. The tires spin against wet gravel, engine roaring as the car lurches forward. Through the rear window, I see Lorenzo, held back by multiple hands, straining against them, fury and despair etched into every line of his body.
He looks less like a king.
More like a man losing everything.
The cemetery disappears behind us.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asks softly, as if afraid any louder tone might break me further.
My hands are shaking uncontrollably. I wipe at my face, smearing tears and rain and mascara together.
“To the airport,” I whisper.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
Please.
Far away.
Far enough that he can’t follow.
Far enough that I can finally breathe.