Chapter 16
RETH
The job took two days.
I could’ve done it in less. But the target was careful, and careful men require patience, and patience is the one thing I have in quantities that never run out.
Rowan's jobs are always clean—no theatrics, no drawn-out suffering, nothing like what Valeria sends me to do. Just a target, a window, a clean exit.
Rowan's message came an hour later.
Stay two days. Make sure it's clean.
I stared at it for a long moment. Thought about what two more days in Brussels means.
What two more days means in the context of what's waiting on the other side of them—a flight back, Valeria's compound, the performance of a man who spent a week in Paris with a woman he loves and is now required to pretend he doesn't.
I texted back one word. Understood.
So I stayed.
The hotel Rowan chose is the kind I hate. Glass and marble and staff who make eye contact in a way that means they've been taught to treat every guest like the most important person in the room. Everything on display. Nothing to hide behind.
Give me a backstreet motel any day—the kind where you pay cash by the hour and nobody remembers your face and the sheets are thin and the lock on the door requires actual attention. Those rooms, I understand. They don't pretend to be anything.
This room pretends to be everything.
It wants you to believe it’s curated, personalized, exclusive.
The bedsheets are white on white on white, layered in that excessive way of hotels that want you to understand how many thread counts they can afford.
A single chocolate on the pillow like punctuation at the end of a sentence nobody asked for.
And there’s a painting over it that tries to convince me colors can have feelings.
The tub had a brochure beside it, rolled like a scroll, for Christ’s sake. It detailed the sixteen essential oils and the origin stories of every single one in the bath salts they provided. It’s a four-hundred square feet box, and I’m suffocating.
I've been sitting on the chair in the corner for an hour staring at the wall.
No contact with Paris. That's the rule—mine, not anyone else's. No calls, no texts, nothing that can be traced or intercepted or used. The silence is operational. Correct. And it's making me want to climb out of my own fucking skin.
I don't know how she is.
I don't know if she found the lollipop and understood or if she found it and fell apart. I don’t know if she cried—if she’s still crying.
I don’t know if she’s angry, lonely, if she’s eating.
And the not knowing sits in my chest like a coal that won't cool, like something alive and burning that discipline can't quite reach.
What I do know is that Ian’s there, ready to hold the pieces if they’re falling apart.
And I hate that. I appreciate it, but I hate that he’s there and not me.
I hate that he gets to see her every day while I sit and ache for her in ways I never thought humanly possible.
Some parts of me miss the days when I felt nothing.
It was easier. Cleaner. Functioning on routine, muscle memory, calculations. Not emotions and hope and love.
I think about the muffins cooling on the counter.
The stupid tenderness of standing in her kitchen while she slept and making her something she could wake up to.
Like muffins are sufficient apology for disappearing.
Like anything I'm capable of is sufficient for someone who deserves everything I can't give her.
God, I miss her.
Not just the way her body feels wrapped around mine—though, fuck, I miss that too. The velvet heat of her clenching around me, the broken little sigh she makes when I sink deep, the way her thighs tremble when she comes. I miss all of it with a hunger that borders on madness.
But I miss her more.
The way her smile starts in her eyes first—that slow, radiant thing that lights up her whole face.
The sound of her laugh, soft and surprised, like she still can’t believe the world can be gentle with her.
I miss the way she looks at me when she thinks I’m not watching, like I’m something worth saving.
Like I’m not just the painted monster, but the man she chose anyway.
I miss the quiet moments. Her bare feet padding across the floor.
The way she hums off-key when she thinks no one’s listening.
The ridiculous way she argues with Ian about cheese like it’s the most important thing in the universe.
The way she traces the tattoos on my chest with her fingertips like she’s reading every scar, every sin, every broken promise, and still loves me through all of it.
I left all of that behind.
I left her warm and soft and trusting in that bed, still smelling like sex and me, her lips slightly parted in sleep, and I walked away because hurting her is the only way of saving her.
She deserves better than a lollipop and cold muffins.
She deserves a man who stays.
Instead, she got me.
A monster who kisses her goodbye with baked goods and a heart-shaped candy because he’s too fucking ruined to give her anything real.
Too selfish to wake her up and watch her eyes fill with tears.
Too terrified that if she looked at me while I left, I wouldn’t be able to walk out that door.
And I had to walk out. There was no other option.
Loving her has a price, and I’m paying it in silence and guilt and the throb of missing her.
The itch starts around the same time the self-loathing does.
It always does.
A familiar burn under my skin, crawling up the back of my neck, settling behind my eyes like a thousand tiny needles.
My hands flex at my sides, remembering the feel of the powder, the sharp chemical bite at the back of my throat, the sweet, merciful numbness that used to drown out everything else.
One line. Just one. Enough to blunt the edges of this grief, enough to make the memory of her smile hurt a little less.
It would be so easy to disappear inside that white static where nothing matters—not the way she looked sleeping in my shirt, not the sound of her whispering my real name, not the knowledge that I just left the only good thing I’ve ever touched to wake up alone.
Just one. Fucking. Line.
I get up, start pacing. Hands running through my hair.
I don’t carry the box anymore. I thought keeping the addiction close and not caving gave me some sort of strength. Proximity as proof of willpower. Like keeping the knife at your own throat is the same thing as not being afraid of it.
After Prague, after Valeria proved how hard she can play this game now that Sophia’s in it, I decided to get rid of it. Not that it’ll be difficult to get my hands on cocaine here in Brussels.
But I won’t give in. If I chase that high even once, I’ll never stop. I’ll drown in it. And then I won’t be able to crawl back to her. I won’t be able to keep the promise I made with my body still buried inside hers.
So I breathe through it. Through the itch. Through the self-loathing that feels like acid in my veins. Through the memory of her smile, the way her fingers traced my scars like they were beautiful instead of ugly.
“Fuck.” I grab my jacket. Go to the hotel bar instead.
It’s not my usual scene, sitting in an open space where wearing my buff would get me a concerned look from the ma?tre d' and a wellness check from hotel security.
So I opt for being the most interesting thing in the room by being the man with the ugly-ass scar.
It's the lesser evil.
The bar is quiet for a Friday—a few businessmen, a couple at a corner table, the low amber light of a place designed to make expensive drinks feel like a reward.
I sit at the far end where my back is to the wall and I can see the entrance, and I order a beer I don't particularly want because my hands need something to do that isn't the karambit.
Two days.
In two days, I fly back and walk into Valeria's compound and become what I am there—her weapon, her asset, the thing she owns and runs and punishes and collects.
After the best week of my life. After days of Sophia and the fireplace in July and the things we said on the living room floor that I'm still carrying in my chest like something I don't know how to put down.
She said I love you.
She said it plainly, without armor, like it was simple. Like it wasn't the most catastrophic thing anyone has ever handed me. I think about it the way you think about a live grenade—too much and you’re dead, ignore it and you’re dead, but for half a heartbeat it holds the promise of everything.
I take a long pull of the beer. Stop thinking about it.
Start again immediately.
I'm so deep inside my own head that I don't register the footsteps. Don't register anything until he's already crossing the room—jacket collar up, shaking water from his hair, laughing at something on his phone—the private laugh, unperformed, the kind you only do when you think you're alone.
I know that laugh. I know that voice. And I know that jaw because it looks just like his mother’s.
Samuel Capello.
He scans the bar for a seat. Finds me instead.
We look at each other, and the air changes the way it does between two people who grew up in the same house and understood from early on that the house was wrong and never talked about it. Not once. Not in thirteen years.
I run the math in under three seconds.
Rowan's hotel. Rowan's two days. Rowan's shipping company that Samuel runs the legitimate face of. This is no coincidence. Rowan put us both here, like chess pieces. Now I just have to figure out why.
Samuel reluctantly walks up to the bar, slides into the seat next to me. “Reth.”
“Samuel.”
The bartender comes. Samuel orders in French—easy, practiced, the French of a man who travels for work and has been doing it long enough that it stopped being impressive. He wraps both hands around the glass when it arrives and stares at it for a moment.