Chapter 12
Izzy
It was strange, the way trust began.
Not with grand gestures or declarations. Not with vows or promises. It started small. A look held a second too long. A laugh shared at the right moment. The comfort of being seen—really seen—by someone who felt familiar before they were known.
You handed pieces of yourself over without ceremony. Your time. Your patience. Your belief that people were, at their core, decent. You told yourself that love meant loyalty, that standing by someone when they were struggling was proof of character, not a warning sign.
I had given him everything without realizing I was doing it.
My space. My money. My energy.
I told myself relationships weren’t meant to be easy, that love was work, and work sometimes looked like sacrifice.
I filled in the gaps he left behind. I softened his rough edges with excuses.
I ignored the quiet voice in my head because it was inconvenient and unromantic and didn’t fit the story I wanted to believe.
The truth didn’t arrive all at once.
It crept in.
It was the way he never quite explained where he’d been. The way his apologies were always vague but convincing. The way I learned to stop asking questions because the answers never sat right anyway. I adjusted. Adapted. Made myself smaller around the discomfort until it felt normal.
That was the most lethal part.
Because when something becomes normal, you stop questioning it.
You don’t notice when your standards lower. When your boundaries blur. When you begin measuring love by how much you’re willing to endure instead of how much you’re allowed to need.
And then one day, you wake up.
Not dramatically. Not with clarity crashing down like thunder. You wake up with a suffocating, awful understanding settling into your bones. A realization so sharp it makes your stomach turn.
You hadn’t been chosen.
You’d been useful.
The memories rearranged themselves after that. Conversations I’d defended. Behaviors I’d minimized. Red flags I’d painted beige so they blended into the background. What once felt like loyalty now looked like negligence—my own, directed inward.
I wasn’t stupid.
That was the part that hurt the most.
I hadn’t been foolish or reckless by nature. I had simply believed someone when they showed me the version of themselves they wanted me to see. I had loved with an open hand, and he had taken without ever intending to give back.
Trust, I realized, wasn’t something you lost in a single moment.
It was something that eroded carefully while you weren’t looking.
By the time you noticed the damage, it was already done.
I didn’t cry when Raze told me.
I thought I might—thought the words would knock the air out of me, split something open—but they didn’t. They settled instead. Wrong. Foreign. As though the truth had been circling me for a long time and had finally found a place to land.
Nathan Azzopardi. Drug runner. Mule.
Raze wasn’t the kind of man who dealt in misinformation. He didn’t posture or speculate. When he spoke, it was because he was certain. That knowledge alone made my stomach twist harder than the words themselves.
I’d believed Nathan was many things—selfish, unreliable, emotionally absent—but never that. Never that.
And yet.
Little things I’d dismissed because loving someone meant giving them the benefit of the doubt, even when they didn’t deserve it.
The late nights and unexplained absences. The burner phone that he swore was “for work.”
The way he never let me come to certain parts of the city with him.
I carried him through stretches of uncertainty, followed by weeks where he borrowed money and insisted he was “between jobs.”
Between jobs.
I pressed my palms into my eyes, focusing on each inhale and exhale, like I could keep the panic from escalating if I mastered my body hard enough.
How had I been so blind?
No—worse. The signs had been there. I just hadn’t wanted to see them. Because seeing them would have meant admitting I’d wasted years on a man who took more than he gave and never once tried to be better.
Nathan hadn’t been my great love. He’d been a problem I thought I could solve. A mess I convinced myself was temporary. I’d stayed because leaving felt like failure, and because walking away would’ve meant acknowledging that effort didn’t always equal reward.
And now this.
Drugs.
The word alone made my skin crawl. I’d grown up watching what addiction did to people—how it stripped them down, turned them into shadows of themselves. I’d sworn I’d never be anywhere near that world.
What if I already had been?
The thought came sharp and sudden. What if he’d left something in my apartment?
My chest tightened. I pictured my tiny kitchen, the cupboards I never checked properly, the closet where he’d kept a spare duffel bag. What if there had been something hidden there—something illegal, something relentless—and I’d been living with it without ever knowing?
What if the police had come instead of Raze?
The image made me shudder.
What if I’d been dragged into it by association? By proximity. By being with the wrong person. What if I’d ended up another cautionary story—another gullible girl who fell for a man with secrets and paid for it with her freedom?
I hugged my arms around myself, suddenly cold.
Raze had been angry. Not at me—at Nathan. At the fact that someone was dealing on his turf. I didn’t need him to explain what that meant. I could hear it in the way his voice had gone flat. Dangerous.
Whatever happened when he found Nathan would not be gentle.
The thought should have scared me for Nathan. It didn’t.
Instead, it scared me because of how close I’d come to being collateral. To being dragged into a war I hadn’t known was happening. To being a bystander standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, trusting a man who didn’t deserve it.
I sank down onto the edge of the bed, fingers twisting into the blanket. The house around me felt like it was holding its breath.
If none of this had happened—if Raze hadn’t intervened, if Nathan hadn’t disappeared—would I still be there? Still making excuses? Still handing over rent money and emotional labor to a man who was running drugs behind my back?
The realization hurt more than betrayal ever could.
I hadn’t just been fooled.
I’d been used.
And the worst part was how easily it could have gone differently. One bad night. One wrong knock on the door. One moment where Nathan decided I was expendable instead of useful.
I swallowed hard, nausea curling low in my stomach.
I wasn’t built for that world. I didn’t want to be hardened by it. I didn’t want to learn how to survive it the way Raze clearly had. The idea of it pressing in around me—of violence and money and power bleeding into my life—made my skin prickle with dread.
I wasn’t meant to be here.
And yet, here I was.
Safe. For now. Because a man I barely knew had decided I didn’t belong in the mess my boyfriend had created.
That was the part I didn’t know how to reconcile.
I’d been reckless with my heart—but not malicious. I’d loved badly, not addictively. And the difference mattered.
Whatever Nathan had done, whatever Raze planned to do about it—I knew one thing with aching clarity.
I had been standing on the edge of something dark and hadn’t even known it.
And the fact that I’d walked away—barely—left me shaken in a way I couldn’t yet name.
I had been na?ve. And that knowledge settled into me like a heavy coat I couldn’t take off—uncomfortable, unavoidable, and suddenly very, very real.
And then—like something sharp turning in my chest—the thought shifted.
Because every single thing I could lay at Nathan’s feet also applied to Raze.
It was worse, actually, because Raze didn’t pretend. He didn’t hide behind half-truths or soft edges. There was no illusion with him. No safe version I could cling to.
I knew exactly what he was. What he did. What he was capable of.
A quiet, sick understanding settled over me, heavier than before.
I hadn’t walked away from danger. I had walked right into it. With my eyes open and convinced myself it was something else entirely.
My chest tightened as the final piece clicked into place.
Nathan had never been the war.
He had just been standing too close to it.
And now he was standing in the path of something far worse.
Because I knew what would happen if Raze found him.
There would be no conversation. No negotiation. No moment of mercy. Raze wasn’t the type of man to operate like that.
He would erase Nathan. Quick. Efficient. Final. Like he had never existed in the first place.
My stomach turned, the weight of it settling low and heavy.
This wasn’t a love triangle. This wasn’t confusion or lingering feelings or unfinished business. This was a collision course. And I was standing right in the middle of it. Still pretending I had a choice.