Chapter 14 #2
Because counting means understanding the number, and understanding the number means understanding what the number costs him.
Not in the abstract way I used to—the clinical research papers, the psychological studies about what repeated exposure to violence does to the architecture of a human being.
But rather in that particular toll of a man who needed to mark each one because otherwise they would blur together, and blurring together would mean something he couldn't allow.
Like each mark is a refusal to let it become ordinary.
An insistence on bearing witness to his own destruction.
I run my thumb along the rows of them—carefully, like I'm reading something written in a language I'm only beginning to understand. All the things he's done and been made to do and carried alone in the only way he knew how to carry them.
I look up. “Who sends you? Her?”
The fire pops quietly. Outside, Paris. Inside, just us.
“Yeah.” He stares at the fireplace, hard lines slowly forming on his expression.
“Who is she?” My heart beats a staccato rhythm, because I don’t want to know. But I do.
“Valeria.” He bites out her name like it’s poison. “Valeria Capello.”
The name lands differently than I expected. Not like a stranger's name. Like something that's been in the room with us this whole time and finally decided to introduce itself.
“Who is she to you?”
“Handler. Owner. Devil.” Blue eyes remain on the flames. “Adopted mother.”
My heart breaks quietly. Not dramatically—no crack, no collapse. Just this slow, spreading fracture that moves outward from the center of my chest until it reaches every edge of me. Because now I can slot it in. The file I've been building without knowing I was building it.
Every fragment he's handed me—the buff, the karambit, the lines, the cocaine, the scar he put on his own face because people called him beautiful before they hurt him. Every piece that didn't quite connect to every other piece.
Now it does.
Now I have the center of it. The origin point.
A woman who was supposed to be his safe harbor.
Who was supposed to be the adult in the room, the person who stood between a grieving boy and a world that had already taken everything from him.
Who looked at a child and understood exactly how to use every vulnerability.
The betrayal of it moves through me like something physical.
I know what it does to a person when the one who was supposed to protect them becomes the thing they need protecting from.
I've sat across from it in supervision sessions and the careful, controlled language of people describing damage they don't yet have words for.
I know the specific shape of that wound—the way it doesn't just hurt, it disorients.
It rewires the configuration of what safety means. What trust means. What home means.
A tear rolls down my cheek, one I cry for the boy who needed love, who instead got destruction.
“She was supposed to protect you,” I say quietly. Not to him, exactly. Just—out loud. Just because it needs to be said by someone.
“Yeah, well. Now she’s the ringmaster with a leash around my neck.” He says it plainly. Without drama. The way he says facts he's stopped fighting.
“Then why go back to her? I understand you were a boy then, but now? You no longer have to do what she says.”
“I do what she says because the alternative costs more than I'm willing to pay.”
“What does the alternative cost?”
His eyes find mine, hold them. “Everything I love.”
I sit with that. Turn it over. And then something shifts in my thinking—the professional brain engaging sideways the way it always does, finding the thread that doesn't quite fit, pulling on it.
Everything I love.
Not everything I have. Not everything I've built. Everything I love.
I'm recent. Whatever this is between us, it’s only been months—for me, anyway—and he's been going back to her for years. Which means it’s not only me he’s protecting.
“Who is she using against you?”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. The fire pops. Outside, a car passes on the street below, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.
“My little sister.”
And there it is. The other piece. The one that makes the whole picture cohere.
A boy whose name means guardian…to protect. His little sister. And then a woman who understood exactly what that charge was worth and spent years collecting on it.
“Mary Elizabeth,” he continues, sweat starting to bead on his chest, and I'm not sure if it's the fire or the weight of saying it all out loud for the first time.
I watch a bead of sweat track slowly down the center of his sternum, over the cracked ironwork of the tattoo, and I think about what it means to finally put something down that you've been carrying so long you forgot it had weight.
How the body responds to that kind of release the same way it responds to everything else that matters—with heat, with trembling, with the physical evidence of something enormous moving through it.
“She has Mary,” I say.
He nods.
“And as long as you comply—”
“Mary is safe.” His jaw tightens, then he looks at me. I'm so sure he's about to say something else—but then his hand cups my cheek instead, like he decided against it.
“Nazareth,” I say, biting back tears.
“I know, baby.”
“She can't have you forever,” I say. “She just can’t.”
“And she won’t.” He sits up, the determination in his eyes burning brighter than the fireplace. “I’ll get Mary out. I’ll get all of us out of this. I fucking swear it to you.”
He kisses me. And the moment his mouth crashes into mine, it’s desperate—not rough, but starving.
Like he’s trying to pour every unsaid word, every promise, every broken piece of himself into me before the world rips us apart again.
His hands cradle my face like I’m made of glass and gunpowder at the same time, thumbs brushing away the tears.
I taste salt and fear and love so fierce it hurts.
I kiss him back just as desperately, fingers threading into his hair, a place that’s no longer part of a barrier, pulling him closer, closer, like if I can just get him deep enough inside my soul, he won’t be able to leave.
A broken sound escapes my throat—half sob, half moan—and he drinks it down like it’s air and he’s drowning.
When he pulls back just enough to rest his forehead against mine, our breaths mingle, ragged and hot. “It’s only ever been you.”
The words break me open like they always do. A man who thinks he’s not capable of love, but who loves with this kind of hunger that could raze and remake the world.
Tears spill freely down my cheeks now, and he kisses them away, slow and reverent, like each one is sacred.
“I love you, Nazareth. So much, it scares me.”
“And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure it stops scaring you.”
Another kiss, deeper this time as he lays me back on the carpet with a gentleness that makes my chest ache. There’s no rush. No bruising grip or filthy promises. Just him—moving over me like I’m something holy he’s terrified of breaking.
His hands tremble as they slide down my sides, then he gathers my wrists to pin them above my head, and he just looks at me.
Really looks. Blue eyes trace every inch of my skin like he’s memorizing me, like he’s trying to commit the sight of me soft and open beneath him to memory so he can carry it with him into the dark.
“Every man I've ever been—the weapon, the ghost, the thing Valeria made—none of them deserve you. I'm trying to find the one that does.”
I cup his face, fingers on the scar I’ve come to love. “You think I fell in love with who you could be. I fell in love with who you are right now. Right here. With me.”
Something shifts in his expression—the hard lines dissolving one by one, like a wall coming down brick by brick, until what's left is just him. Raw and open and completely unguarded in a way I've only seen in fragments until now.
And then he looks at me like I just handed him something he'd stopped believing existed.
Leans down and kisses me—not claiming, not devouring, but worshipping.
Slow, deep, lingering kisses that taste like yesterday, today, and forever at the same time.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw, down the column of my throat, pressing open-mouthed kisses over my racing pulse like he can calm it with devotion alone.
When he finally settles between my thighs, he doesn’t push inside right away. He rests his forehead against mine, breathing me in, letting the weight of him press me into the carpet in the most tender cage I’ve ever known.
“I’ll never stop until we have forever.” He pushes inside me, eyes locked on mine the entire time. I feel every inch. Every breath. Every heartbeat. He doesn’t just fill my body—he fills the hollow places inside my chest, the cracks I didn’t know were there.
“Stay with me,” I whisper against his mouth as he moves, deep and unhurried, like he’s trying to memorize the way we fit together. “Even when you’re gone… stay with me.”
“I’m right here, baby,” he breathes, hips rolling in that devastatingly tender rhythm. “I’ve always been right here.”
Tears slip down my temples into my hair. Every slow thrust feels like a vow. Every kiss against my throat, my collarbone, my lips—a promise he’s carving into my soul.
This isn’t just sex.
This is him loving me so completely that I start to believe maybe, just maybe, we’ll win.
I come with his name on my lips and tears on my tongue, and he follows right after, burying his face in my neck, whispering my name like it’s the only prayer he’ll ever need.
For a long time afterward, we stay tangled together, hearts pounding against each other, sweat and tears cooling on our skin.
He doesn’t pull out. He stays buried inside me, arms wrapped around me like he can shield me from the future that’s already coming for us. And I let myself believe—just for this moment—that love like this might actually be strong enough to survive it.
Maybe.