Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Fiero
The city feels unfamiliar when I leave the club. Not because anything has changed, but because I have.
The events of the night have only served to solidify what I knew but was too afraid to admit: Pfeiffer is my girl, my love, my home.
To be fair, a lot of things have stood in our way: the memory of what she did that day, the abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle, the hatred each of my brothers had for her.
But she was always meant to be mine.
Rain starts the second I step outside, an eerie reminder of the last day I returned home from school.
But I can still hear Cass’s voice in my head.
Like the world will end if you don’t love her back.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel until my knuckles ache.
By the time I pull up outside Pfeiffer’s apartment building, my chest feels too tight to take a full breath. I stare at the place through the windshield for a long moment.
Jesus Christ. This is where she lives?
The building is old and the bricks are stained dark with age and weather. A rusted fire escape snakes down the front and the deli beneath it has iron shutters pulled halfway down, flickering fluorescent lights buzzing behind the glass.
A bitter taste floods my mouth. Every night at the club, after I dressed her in designer silk, fucked her in Egyptian cotton and let her cry on me in a luxurious penthouse, she came back here. To this. To fluorescent kitchen lights, old fire escapes and subway steam.
I kill the engine and sit here another minute before finally forcing myself out.
It’s nearly midnight so it’s mostly quiet except for faint voices arguing somewhere in the building. Her world feels stark and real, not the polished world I wrapped around her while setting fire to everything beneath her feet.
I walk up the stairs to the second floor. Apartment 4C.
Then I knock, softly. If her father’s asleep, I don’t want to wake him.
Nothing happens for a second, but then I hear footsteps. Then a lock sliding. Then the door opens.
Pfeiffer freezes, her features paused in shock.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders, damp at the ends like she recently showered.
She’s wearing an oversized sweatshirt and soft grey shorts, every inch a girl I should’ve protected instead of destroyed.
“F-Fiero?”
Her voice barely makes it out.
My throat tightens. “Hi.”
She steps aside. “My dad’s awake,” she says quietly.
Now I feel doubly guilty, and selfish, for turning up here in the middle of the night because of a mistake that I made. Because I’m coming after something I want, without thought for the fact she has a life and a routine and a father to care for.
The apartment is tiny. It’s clean and loved, but stretched thin.
She takes me straight to a small kitchen barely separated from the living room. It’s tidy and smells like lemon.
And there are signs of an older man everywhere.
Reading glasses are folded neatly on the table. Medication is lined up near the coffee machine. A blanket is draped carefully over the back of a chair.
A bitter fist clenches around my heart. This is what she was carrying while I played revenge games with her life.
“Fifi?”
A rough male voice sounds from deeper in the apartment.
Her eyes flick to mine before she turns.
“In the kitchen.”
An elderly man appears slowly from the hallway, one hand braced briefly against the wall. At first I’m disarmed by his likeness to Callum—a man I carved to death. But where Callum wore a sneer, Pfeiffer’s father has a pleasant face and a warm smile. I can see where Pfeiffer gets her softness.
But the smile falls as soon as he sees me.
“Oh,” he says. “You have company.”
Pfeiffer clears her throat. “Dad, this is Mr. Bellucci. My… former boss.”
The words hit like a grenade. Former boss. That’s all I was to her. That’s how she’s describing me to the only family member she has. But I did that. I pushed her away.
I swallow hard and step forward, offering my hand. “Sir.”
He shakes it slowly, his pale eyes darting over my face as if he’s trying to remember something. “Frank.”
“I left something behind at work,” she mutters, flustered. “He just came to drop it off.”
“Oh, um, yeah.” I reach into my jacket pocket. She couldn’t have given me a more perfect segue.
I hold out a wad of notes.
“Your final pay check,” I say, nodding for her to take it.
There’s about ten thousand right there. I’ll wire her the rest—whatever she needs for her father’s treatment.
He watches the exchange, then the blood seems to drain from his face. But it isn’t the bundle of notes that causes it. It’s something else.
“Where’s mom, Fifi?”
Pfeiffer freezes for several long, horrible seconds.
Then she reaches for him, and I recognize something I saw when she worked in my club, when she talked to guests, showed them to their tables, talk their drinks orders. She wore the same protective mask that slides over her face now.
"Dad," she says gently, taking his hands. "Mom passed away. Remember?"
Frank blinks and for a moment, sinks deeper into a state of confusion. Then his eyes fill with tears.
There’s something painfully vulnerable about one man watching another man cry, and something akin to utter devastation in knowing I’ve made this life worse.
"Oh,” he whispers. “That's right."
"It's okay," Pfeiffer says, in a well-practised, soothing voice. "It's okay."
His voice cracks. “No. I forgot her again.”
Again? How often does this happen? How many times has Pfeiffer had to survive this?
Frank stares somewhere over Pfeiffer's shoulder, grief washing over his face with such raw force that I have to look away.
“Florence,” he whispers. “She'll think I didn't love her.”
Pfeiffer swallows loudly. I can see in this moment exactly what she’s been holding together and it makes me sick to my stomach.
“Dad, no.” She squeezes his hands tighter. “Mom knew you loved her. She always knew.”
“Okay,” he mutters, but it’s uncertain.
“Come on. Let’s get you to bed, Dad,” Pfeiffer says, gently steering him from the kitchen. Then she glances over her shoulder at me. “I’ll be right back.”
I nod, the movement gnawing at my skull.
A sudden onset of indescribable grief makes my bones vibrate. Now, I understand. Every time she checked her phone, every time she left to ‘check on her father,’ every time her smile seemed just a touch forced, this was why.
Pfeiffer isn't just caring for her father. She’s losing him.
And while she’s been carrying all of this alone, I’ve been taking her away from this, using her for pleasure and destroying the one thing that brought her light.
Jesus Christ.
What the fuck have I done?
She offers me an apologetic smile when she returns to the kitchen.
“Would you like coffee?”
I’m a shell of a person right now—exactly what I deserve to be. I certainly don’t deserve coffee.
“Okay.”
I watch her move around the tiny kitchen, and the normalcy of it kills me.
She clicks on the coffee machine and reaches for a pair of unmatched mugs.
She pushes dampened hair behind her ear.
Her face is completely free of make-up and she looks young and innocent and not at all deserving of what I did to her.
She hands me a mug without meeting my eyes.
“Thanks.”
Her fingers brush mine briefly, and the contact unravels me. Then her gaze drifts toward the wall near the refrigerator and her expression changes instantly.
“He used to do it there,” she says quietly.
I follow her line of sight. “What?”
She folds her arms tightly across herself. “Callum.”
Ice floods my bloodstream.
She takes a deep, sobering breath. “He’d back me into the wall. I was always cornered.”
I stare at the exact spot she’s looking at, and suddenly—
The tile, the angle, the floor beneath us.
Recognition hits me so hard I feel nauseous. This is where the photographs were taken.
My stomach turns. “Pfeiffer… Do you remember being drugged?”
Her brows pull together slowly. “No.”
Fuck. She doesn’t remember all the things he did to her. There’s no wonder her mind shut down. All she ever knew were fragments and shame she carried alone while we, meanwhile, had sharpened her into a villain.
I set the coffee down before I drop it.
“I’m sorry.”
She says nothing but a thick tear tracks all the way down her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, harsher this time. “For all of it. For what he did to you, for blaming you all these years. I’m sorry I took my hurt out on you—you didn’t deserve that.”
My throat burns with shame.
“I’m sorry I turned you away tonight. I didn’t want to. I… don’t want to.”
She gnaws on her lips, still staring at the same spot on the wall.
“I made a huge mistake, Pfeiffer.”
She wipes the back of her hand over her cheek, like she’s almost angry at herself for getting upset.
“I fucking love you, Pfeiffer. I’ve loved you for years. Even before you knew I existed, I loved you. I never stopped.”
She goes completely still, then she cries into her hands, her shoulders heaving harshly.
I don’t know what to do. I want to go to her and put my arms around her, but I don’t want to invade her space after I’ve hurt her so badly.
Streetlight from the window illuminates the tears cascading down over her fingers and I feel them like knives twisting into my gut.
I can only pray I’m not too late.
Eventually, she removes her hands and wipes away the last of the tears.
“You have no idea how badly I wanted to hear that,” she whispers.
Hope dares to crawl back into my veins.
She wraps her arms around herself tighter.
“It wasn’t until you walked away that I understood what we had.” Her voice shakes now. “What I lost.”
“Pfeiffer—”
“I forgive you.”
The relief is so immediate it almost knocks me off the chair. But something feels wrong—she still won’t look at me. And suddenly I realize forgiveness isn’t the same thing as trust.
“Talk to me,” I say quietly.
She laughs once. Not cruelly, but as though it’s either that or cry another river of tears.
“You set me up, Fiero.”
She finally turns around, tears swimming in those turquoise eyes I’ve loved half my life. “It was calculated, detailed, drawn out over weeks.”
The hope shatters in my bloodstream making me hot with shame.
“You planned it all—every detail.”
“Pfeiffer—”
“You know what kind of person is capable of doing that to someone?”
I can’t answer. Because I know exactly what kind of person does that. I became that person.
“Even after you took my virginity…” Her voice cracks completely. “You still kept going.”
Jesus Christ.
“I loved you,” she whispers. “And the entire time, you already knew how this would end.”
I swallow, almost choking on the dryness of my throat.
“You never intended to choose me.”
“That’s not true.”
“But it was true then.” The tears of sadness have turned into tears of fury now. “You always planned to walk away and hurt me when I’d already given you everything.”
The room feels suddenly airless. I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out. The irony of that isn’t lost on me. The one time I really need to fucking say something, I can’t.
But it’s her last line that reopens every wound I’ve ever survived.
“You let me believe I was finally safe, and I wasn’t.”
She wipes angrily at her face and steps back from me, and I realize with cold horror that I’ve lost her.
“You know what the saddest part is?”
I lift my gaze to hers, letting down my guard for the final blow—everything I’ve earned.
“If you'd come to me first and told me the truth before it all came out the way it did…”
My fists curl, the short nails drawing blood from my palms.
“…I’d have found a way to get past it.”
My throat tightens with regret and the gun in my waistband burns into my skin, itching to fire a bullet into my brain. Even that would hurt less than this.
“You should go,” she says, turning back to the window.
I let her words hover for a moment, every inch of me praying she’ll take them back, but she doesn’t.
My muscles hurt when I rise to my feet. I leave the coffee untouched and walk heavily toward the door. I move slowly in the hope she tries to stop me, but she doesn’t.
At the threshold, I glance back once. She’s standing in the kitchen beneath harsh fluorescent lights, her arms wrapped around herself like she’s trying not to fall apart.
And I realize, as every vital organ aches with regret, that no amount of love will erase what I turned ours into.