Chapter 31
The coffee is bitter and cold. I’m staring at the tablet on my desk, the blue light stinging my eyes.
No security footage or weapons recovered. Just forty bodies in a high-security prison wing. The news anchors are talking about gang wars and internal collapses.
They’re wrong.
It was a tantrum. A forty-body-count tantrum because a woman with his eyes told him he was a monster. Valerio went to a place where he could kill without consequence to remind himself of who he is.
My phone vibrates against the mahogany. The screen reads: L. MORELLI.
I grip my hair, pulling until it hurts. I want to let it ring. I want to throw the phone into the Hudson. But Lucian Morelli isn’t a man you ignore. He’s the one who signs the checks and keeps the police away from my door.
I slide to answer.
“What the fuck, Charlotte?”
The hair on my arms stands up. “Things were going so well,” I mutter. “Therapy isn’t linear, Mr. Morelli. You know that. It’s two steps forward, one bloodbath back.”
“Enough with the bullshit. Something triggered this. Valerio was stable. Now he’s painting walls with inmates.” There’s a pause where I can hear his teeth grinding. “Do you know what happened?”
My hands start to sweat, the phone becoming slick in my grip.
“Tell me,” Lucian growls.
“It’s your mother.”
I hear Lucian’s breath hitch—a rare slip of his cold mask.
“We—he stumbled on her in a café,” I blurt out. My mind is racing, trying to find a way to frame it that doesn’t show him I was on a date with his brother. “She said some… unsavory things to him.”
“Charlotte,” Lucian snaps. “Isabella has avoided this family like the plague since she escaped. She wouldn’t voluntarily walk up to a Morelli in broad daylight. You’re hiding something. Tell me. Now.”
I swallow hard, the cold coffee sitting like poison in my stomach. I have to tell him.
“We were having coffee. Together. Outside the office,” I confess, the words tumbling out. “She approached us to warn me away. She told me to run. It triggered him, Lucian. It blew the whole thing apart.”
“Interesting,” Lucian mutters. His anger has cooled into something more calculating. “A coffee date. Is that the ‘treatment’ I’m paying for?”
I don’t answer, my cheeks flushing red.
“Listen,” Lucian sighs. “I’ll try to convince him to come in today.
But he’ll only humor me so much. No one forces a Morelli to do anything they don’t want to do.
This is your only chance, Doctor. If you can’t convince him in this session that therapy is worth it—that you are worth it—he won’t come again. ”
If Valerio walks out that door today, he won’t return. I’ll lose him forever. That can’t happen.
“I understand, Mr. Morelli,” I mutter.
“Make it count, Charlotte.”
The line clicks shut.
I put my head in my hands. I have maybe an hour before Valerio walks into my office. I need to figure out what I’m going to say so he won’t give up on us and himself. I can’t lose him when I was just having him. He deserves happiness, and I’m sure I can give him that. I want to give him that.
Please, Valerio. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t give up on us.
Three hours later, Valerio walks in, and the room temperature drops ten degrees.
He’s wearing a charcoal suit, buttoned to the chin, black leather gloves pulled tight over his wrists.
He looks exactly like he did the first day.
There is no trace of the man who breathed my name into the crook of my neck yesterday.
The scent of bleach follows him. He completely scrubbed any last trace of me off of him.
“I saw the news, Valerio. Blackwood.”
He sits in the chair calmly. “Prisoners die every day, Doc. It’s a high-stress environment.”
“Forty men don’t die in a ‘glitch.’ You’re spiraling because of yesterday. Because of her.”
“I don’t spiral,” he spits. “I was getting soft. I had to remind my nervous system what it’s actually for. It’s for ending lives, not holding hands in coffee shops.”
My pride is stinging, but my heart—that stupid thing I usually keep locked—is currently pinned to my sleeve.
“When you made love to me, Valerio… it wasn’t the touch of a monster. I felt you. I enjoyed it. I thought our date—”
“Date?” He lets out a harsh laugh that cuts me open.
“Making love? Is that what you’re calling it?
You think you can keep a Morelli just because you spread your legs for him?
You’re a therapist, Charlotte. You’re supposed to be smart.
My skin was crawling the entire time. Yes, your pussy was good, but I’m sure it’s nothing special.
I can find the same pleasure in any club in this city without the boring conversation. ”
His words fucking hurt. Fuck him, his words kill.
But one of my greatest sins has always been pride. Valerio isn’t the only one who knows how to build walls; he just handed me the bricks himself.
The heat in my chest turns to dry ice. I blink once, and when I open my eyes, the woman who wanted to save him is gone. My expression is as flat as his.
“You’re right, Mr. Morelli,” I say. “I apologize. I clearly misinterpreted a biological release for more. That’s a failure on my part.”
His brows furrow. He shifts in the chair, his eyes searching mine for the hurt that was there seconds ago. He expected me to cry, to beg, to be the victim. In his bloody dreams.
“I’m going to cut our session short today,” I continue, closing my notebook with a thud. “I have another requirement to attend to, and frankly, we’ve reached a stalemate with your current trauma processing.”
I stand up, smoothing my skirt.
“However, if you ever find yourself needing specific sessions for… engaging with women, if you’re struggling with performance or the ‘filth’ aspect of sex, I can refer you to a specialist. Or, if you prefer the familiarity, I can try to help even though it’s not my specialty, provided the rate is adjusted.
” The green-eyed monster slithers into my soul as I speak, but I push it down as best as I can.
A vein in his temple pulses. His jaw goes rigid, and he stands up, looming over the desk. The air in the room feels like it’s about to catch fire.
“What?” he growls.
“I overstepped,” I mutter. “It was a lapse in judgment. It won’t happen again, Mr. Morelli.”
I head for the door, my heels clicking. I can feel the heat radiating off him, a violent pressure at my back.
“Is this it, Doctor?”
I stop. I turn. I even manage a small, empty smile. It’s a mask, and it’s the best one I’ve ever worn.
“You were right, Mr. Morelli. There’s nothing to end because there was never anything to start.
We crossed boundaries that shouldn’t have been crossed.
I apologize again. It was… unprofessional.
Any future sessions will be strictly clinical.
I’ll coordinate the schedule through Lucian.
But I have a busy week ahead, and I’m not sure I can fit you in. ”
I know I’m a fool. Only a fool sleeps with a psychopath. Only a fool thinks she can find a heart in a man who uses a prison massacre as a coping mechanism. I’m hurt—but my pride is the only thing keeping me from breaking down.
He moves with that terrifying, predatory speed. He doesn’t stop until the tips of his handmade Italian shoes are touching my heels.
“Why are you so busy this week, Doctor?” He’s breathing hard.
I should be the bigger person. But I want to hurt him. I want to remind him that while he might be a killer, I’m the one who knows exactly where his nerves are.
“Normally, I wouldn’t disclose my personal schedule,” I whisper.
“But since I’m clearing my books, you should know.
I’ve been feeling… frustrated. I’m taking a vacation.
Clubs, bars, seeing if I can find a man who knows what to do with his hands.
I’m craving a good time, Valerio. To be honest?
My last experience with a virgin was… underwhelming. ”
His face doesn’t just turn red; it goes dark, a bruised, violent purple-red. His gloved hands are shaking at his sides.
I don’t wait for the explosion. I leave him behind.
The heavy oak door isn’t enough to muffle the sound. I’m ten feet down the hallway when the first crash hits. Then comes the roar.
CRACK.
That was my desk. I hear the glass of my windows rattle in their frames as he slams something—probably my chair—against the wall. He’s trying to kill the space where I made him feel something.
What have I done?
I took a man who has spent twenty-nine years terrified of his own shadow, and I told him that the only time he was vulnerable was a disappointment.
I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to heal, and instead, I just kicked a man who’s already down.
Who’s the actual monster—me or him? Or both?