Chapter 40 Chris #2
It’s a good excuse. Plausible. It’s been a long evening even with mostly sitting. Anyone else would buy it without question.
Wyatt nods, but his eyes cut sideways to meet mine. He’s not buying it either.
We don’t push. Not now, when she’s already curled against the door like she’s trying to make herself smaller. Tomorrow. We’ll figure it out tomorrow.
The rest of the drive passes in that fragile silence. When we pull into her driveway, Nina is out of the car before Wyatt’s even cut the engine, moving toward her front door with careful, measured steps.
Wyatt catches my arm before I can follow.
“Something happened at the fire pit,” he says quietly. “With Marco and Sadie.”
“Could just be exhaustion,” I say. Neither of us believes it.
Wyatt studies me for a moment, then lets it go. “Come on. Let’s get inside.”
We head inside. Nina’s already halfway down the hall toward her bedroom.
“I’m going to take something and crash,” she calls back. “You two don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”
“We’re staying,” Wyatt says. “We’ve already claimed your guest rooms anyway.”
She pauses at her door, looks back at us. Gratitude flickers across her face before she nods.
I close the distance before she can disappear. My hand settles on her waist, and I tip her chin up so she has to look at me.
“Hey.” I search her face. “You sure you’re okay?”
She holds my gaze, steady and unreadable. That therapist composure that gives nothing away.
“I’m not the one I’m worried about,” she says.
Before I can respond, she rises on her toes and presses a soft kiss to my mouth. Brief. Final.
“Goodnight, Chris.”
The door clicks shut between us.
I stand there for a moment, staring at the wood grain, trying to parse what just happened. I’m not the one I’m worried about. What the hell does that mean?
“Come on.” Wyatt’s hand lands on my shoulder. “She needs sleep. We need a drink.”
The bourbon is good—expensive. Nina doesn’t drink much herself, but she stocks well for guests.
Wyatt pours two fingers into each glass and settles beside me on the couch.
His warmth radiates through the space between us.
Both of us face the dark windows, the city lights scattered below like fallen stars.
The house is quiet around us. Just the hum of the refrigerator, the whir of the furnace kicking on to combat the chill in the air.
I drain half my glass in one swallow.
“Easy,” Wyatt says. “That’s not cheap stuff.”
“I’ll buy her another bottle.”
He doesn’t push. Just sips his own drink and watches the city lights. The silence isn’t uncomfortable, exactly. Just loaded with unspoken words.
I refill my glass.
“Hell of a day,” Wyatt says eventually.
“Yeah.”
More silence. The bourbon warms my chest, loosens the tension in my shoulders. Wyatt’s profile is sharp in the low light. Jaw, cheekbone, the line of his throat. He’s not looking at me, and somehow that makes it easier.
“I kept waiting for something to go wrong,” I say. “The whole dinner. Just... waiting.”
“Nothing went wrong.”
“I know.” I take another drink. “That almost made it worse.”
Wyatt glances at me then, brief and assessing, before turning back to the window. “It was so fucking normal. Zoey running around, Marcella and Elena fussing over the food, Mason complaining about contractors. Like any other family Thanksgiving.”
“That’s the thing.” I stare at the amber liquid in my glass. “Everyone else there was normal. Genuine. Callie and Mason, Marcella and Elena—they’re not performing. They actually love each other, actually care about Sunday dinners and grandchildren and all of it.”
The realization had crept up on me somewhere between the blessing and dessert.
Watching Vicente let Zoey climb into his lap and smear mashed potatoes on his shirt without flinching.
The way he leaned into Arturo’s space with the ease of long intimacy, their shoulders brushing as they passed dishes.
Celeste actually touching his arm during a story while her sisters maintained their polite distance.
The tension was there, but underneath it all was genuine affection. Uncomfortable to witness.
“And seeing him in the middle of that...” I shake my head. “Surrounded by people who mean it. It almost made me believe he meant it too.”
Wyatt’s quiet for a moment. “Did he? Mean any of it?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out.” I drain the rest of my glass. “With Vicente, I never know what’s real and what’s the mask. Maybe nothing. Maybe all of it. Maybe he doesn’t know the difference anymore either.”
“He was watching you,” Wyatt says. Not a question.
“He’s always watching.” The words come easier than they should. Bourbon or exhaustion or just the relief of being out of that house. “That’s what he does. Watches. Waits. Figures out what you need and then gives it to you until you can’t remember how to need anything else.”
The glass is empty again. I reach for the bottle.
“Is that what happened?” Wyatt asks. Still not looking at me. “He figured out what you needed?”
I should stop talking. Should change the subject, make a joke, do anything except answer that question honestly.
But the bourbon’s in my blood now, and we’re both watching each other’s reflections in the dark glass instead of looking directly at each other, and somehow that makes it possible to say things I’ve never said out loud.
“The thing about deep cover—” The words scrape out of me.
“You can’t just invent a person from scratch.
The lie has to be built on truth or it falls apart the first time someone pushes.
So you take the real pieces of yourself—the hunger, the wounds, the shit you’ve never told anyone—and you hand them over.
Wrap them in a new name and call it a cover story.
But it’s still you. The parts that matter are still you. ”
Wyatt’s quiet for a moment. “So what was true? The parts you gave him.”
“Someone who’d never belonged anywhere.” I laugh, and it tastes bitter. “Which sounds ridiculous, right? I had everything. Senator mother—DEA Administrator back then, so literally my boss. Surgeon father. The right schools, the right connections, the golden path laid out in front of me.”
The reflection in the window doesn’t look like me. For a second, it’s Cal Logan staring back—the man I invented, the man Vicente owned.
“But I was never just Chris. I was Katherine Longo’s son first, always.
Adrian Nicolo’s kid second. Every success was because of them—their names, their connections.
Only my failures were my own, and every one of them was a disappointment to the family legacy.
” I take another drink. “I volunteered for deep cover because I wanted something that was mine. Something I earned without their shadow hanging over it. To prove I could be someone without the Longo name opening doors.”
I stare at my reflection, at the ghost of who I used to be.
“I gave Vicente my truth. The man desperate to matter on his own terms. Someone who’d spent his whole life chasing approval he could never quite earn. That was real. That was me. And Vicente took every piece I offered up and figured out exactly how to use them against me.”
The silence stretches. I watch Wyatt’s jaw tighten.
“I handled Mason,” he says quietly. “During his deep cover with the Zavala cartel. Watched what it did to him. How much of himself he had to give away to make the lie hold.” His thumb traces absently over his forearm, over the tattoo I’ve seen but never asked about.
Zoey’s name in delicate script. “When they took his daughter, when we didn’t know if we’d get her back.
.. I thought it was going to break him. Thought I was going to have to watch him shatter and not be able to do a damn thing about it. ”
“But you got her back.”
“We got her back.” His reflection meets my reflection’s eyes. “And I made him a promise. That if anything ever happened to him and Callie, Zoey would never be alone.” He taps the tattoo. “Backup plan. Godfather duties. Whatever you want to call it.”
I don’t know what to say to that. The weight of it—the kind of commitment that gets inked into skin.
“My point is,” Wyatt continues, “I’ve seen what deep cover costs. What it takes from people. You’re not the only one carrying that kind of weight.”
The weight on my chest eases slightly. Not absolution—nothing that clean. But the sense that maybe I’m not speaking into a void.
“I can only speak for what I observed from the outside. But Mason had that, briefly. Belonging. Purpose. Even if it was ultimately a lie. Vicente gave you that too.”
“He gave me everything.” My voice sounds distant. Detached. Like I’m talking about someone else. “Structure. Approval. A place in the world that made sense. And when I performed well, when I pleased him—”
I stop. My throat closes around the rest.
“Chris.”
“The sex wasn’t—” I force the words out. “It wasn’t like what you’re imagining. He never forced me. Never hurt me. It was—” Reward. Recognition. The only time I felt real. “I wanted it. That’s the part that fucks me up. I wanted it so much.”
Five years. Five years of learning to feel when his eyes were on me, when his attention shifted, when he was pleased or disappointed or interested. The conditioning runs deep. Deeper than I want to admit.
My hands are shaking. I set the glass down before I drop it.
“So when I walk into his house today and he looks at me like that—like he still knows me, like he still owns me—” I drag in a breath. “Part of me wants to run. And part of me...”
I can’t finish. Can’t say it.
But Wyatt’s looking at me now. And I see the moment his gaze drops—just for a second—to where my body has made the confession I couldn’t.
Heat floods my face.
“Chris—”
“Don’t.” I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to move. “Just—forget it. I shouldn’t have—”
“Hey.” Wyatt stands too, but he doesn’t close the distance. Just holds his ground, hands open at his sides. “You don’t have to run from me.”
“I’m not running.”
“You’re literally backing toward the door.”
I stop. He’s right. I’m at the top of the steps that lead out of the sunken living room, my whole body angled toward escape.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I say. “Whatever this is. I only know how to—”
Perform. Submit. Disappear into what someone else wants.
Wyatt rises from the couch. Climbs the steps slowly, giving me time to bolt if I need to. But he doesn’t stop until he’s on the same level, close enough to touch. Patient. Steady. Not pushing, not retreating. Just there.
The last of my resistance crumbles.