Chapter 11
Xavier
“ Dead ?”
My chest inflates, expands like some force is tearing my skin sideways from within.
I couldn’t have heard him right.
“She was a sweet girl, but she always seemed like she knew she’d end up that way, you know?”
My mouth won’t open. Words won’t come out.
“You still there?” he asks. “Hello?”
Dead.
He said dead.
My wife.
Sophie.
The connection drops.
Everything—the fountain outside, the grandfather clock in the hall, the crackling fire in the hearth—falls quiet. Sounds distort in my ears until only the pounding of my heart and my heavy gasps remain.
Dead.
When my failing mind finally catches up with my body, I’ve somehow crossed the house.
My arms are already submerged in the top drawer of my dresser, shoving my passport into the coat that is draped over an olive-green tweed suit, one of Sophie’s favorites.
Time is warping because I’m back in the parlor in the span of a blink, frantically snatching everything I can find from the safe.
A near-painful surge of panic drives my legs through the lifeless corridors into the kitchen to search for essentials.
My wallet. Phone. There’s no time to pack or hunt down clothes.
I burst out the front door, clutching only what’s needed, shooting down the steps to the car.
What I don’t expect is to see Bo strolling up the driveway, his motorcycle parked at the gate. “Where are you going?”
“Madrid.”
His mouth falls open. He slams the car door shut before I can get in. “Hold up. What the fuck happened?”
“Let me through.”
“Xavier—”
He doesn’t want to block me. Not right now. I can’t be held responsible for the damage I might unleash.
“Bo, I’m going to Madrid.”
“I'm going with you then.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I need your help here.”
It’s been years since I’ve said those words. Years . I’ve done everything in my power to keep them out of this.
Bo’s gaze sharpens, understanding the significance. “Tell me what you need.”
“I can’t trust anyone. Let Dario know I’m going off-grid. If anything happens, he takes over.”
Bo yanks my jacket, shaking me violently as I tense up, my heart goddamn thrashing my chest while I struggle to open the door. “Xavier, what the fuck , man!”
“I caved,” I blurt out, heaving. “I called the café. She… She isn’t there. He mentioned police. He said?—”
“Said what? ”
“He said she’s?—”
I can’t say the words. Won’t dare to. Judging by the way Bo’s eyes widen to twice their size, it’s clear I don’t need to. “She’s alright, Xavier. She’s okay… You’ll find her.”
As I drop into the driver’s seat and swerve out of the driveway, the consequences of my decisions linger in my mind.
All of the moments I picked up the phone to call that café, aching to hear her voice, only to hesitate. Countless times I ordered them to fuel the jet, only to change our course at the last minute. I drilled the thoughts into myself long enough.
She’s safer without you.
You forced her into this marriage.
You played with fate and lost brutally.
Accept the loss.
It wasn’t mercy. Just sick excuses. Justifications I created to convince myself she deserved more, as if anyone else could protect her better than I could.
Till death do us part.
I spoke those vows. I meant every word… and yet, my wife is a world away.
I did that.
To get revenge, I did that.
What mattered before doesn’t anymore.
Let her hate who I’ve become.
As long as she’s breathing, it doesn’t matter.
“ Claveles rojos !”
As I pay the taxi driver, a woman waves red carnations in my face, the world spiraling in slow motion.
From those budding flowers to the cobblestone terrace of coffee drinkers, my gaze scales the brick building until I'm staring at the door from the pictures I have tucked in my coat .
You’ll find her.
She’s not gone. You’d feel it.
Crossing the street, I envision her in this foreign place. Sitting at this café. Passing by me on the sidewalk. Climbing those stairs.
She’s everywhere.
A bronze bell above the door notifies the owner of my entrance. Unaware that I'm the stranger he spoke to ten hours ago, he offers me a warm greeting, directing me to an open table. “What can I get you, mi amigo?”
“Espresso.” My chest pounds. “I heard something strange about this place the other day.”
“From the news?” He clicks his tongue with disappointment. “Yes, I’ve been dealing with this for days now.”
Days. Fucking days? “What happened? Do you know?”
“Not much. The apartment upstairs is wrecked. They also found blood on the roof and the side street, but they haven’t caught anyone yet.
” He massages the back of his neck, visibly discomforted.
“It’s making locals nervous. This isn’t the type of thing that happens here.
There was a lot of screaming that night. A woman’s.”
Stay. Calm. “I see.”
Mist appears in his eyes at the thought of my wife. “Poor girl. She was too young to go through something like that.”
Somehow, I manage to control the tremors in my voice. “Were you close to her?”
He frowns. “She wasn’t the kind of girl you could get close to. She was always alone. No friends. No man. It seemed she was always waiting for someone.”
As trained as I am, I struggle to conceal how gutting his words are, a disabling wound.
“No one found her… body, though,” I grind out. “The blood could have been someone else’s.”
“Oh, you didn’t hear? ”
Don’t do this to me. Don’t fucking ? —
“We all thought there was a chance she was alive. But she was found this morning. Cops are identifying her.”
It’s not her.
Continue to tell yourself that.
“She looked like her?”
“The police said she’d be identified through an autopsy.”
In other words, they couldn’t tell what she looked like when they found her. My stomach, it goddamn lurches. The images that torment my mind stem from knowing what men like me do to people who are sent for.
“Long black hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. That’s what the conference said.”
I feel all the blood drain out of my face. “Thanks for the information.”
He nods, calling out my order. Before he’s reached the counter, I’ve left euros on the table, sliding out the door.
There are no stars tonight.
The crescent moon provides no light.
The day drifted by slowly as I stood here, anticipating the sunset and a quieter street. Children have retreated indoors while the elderly have brought their chairs in from the sidewalks, settling into their beds. Meanwhile, the unaware café owner has shut his doors and headed home.
My hands shake against the railing as I force myself up the stairs, guilt gnawing at my bones with each step.
Like a machine, I observe the barricaded entrance and the police tape, then approach the window, not thinking twice before I slam my elbow into the glass, shattering it.
The moment I'm inside, I'm struck.
The scent of her. It’s everywhere .
Vanilla. Warmth. Cotton. A hint of her cherry wash.
My wife was here.
No longer merely my imagination, my eyes follow the devastation surrounding me. The broken legs of the chairs, the indents of furniture in the walls, the shattered glass, and the stripped mattress. The insides have been stabbed, scoured for money, no doubt.
My fears come to life through the scene around me.
My hand against the pillar steadies my legs.
Breathe. Don’t lose it, X.
Even with blatant evidence of a struggle, I shrug off my distress and the café owner’s goddamn terrifying words, scanning the room for something—anything—that will tell me what’s happened.
She was obsessed with decorating our apartment in the city with warm tones, flowers in every corner, pictures of us on every mantel.
This studio is barren. There’s no life anywhere.
Pulling open the fridge, I find bottled water. Ointment. Not much else. On the table, my fingers lift a roll of hand tape. A punching bag is chained in the corner. In the bathroom, everything’s where she left it. A single toothbrush. A brush holding long strands of her hair.
There’s nothing. Nothing that could help me.
It takes one step out of the bathroom to sense that I'm no longer alone in this apartment. My eyes pin onto the man by the window, his hands stuffed in his pockets.
Dominic Strata is smiling. Smiling .
He knew I’d come. I knew he’d know.
Like business, I ask a question. It’s leveled—controlled. “Where. Is . She?”
“She’s being hauled out of a lake as we speak.”
Behind the chaos that ensues when I hear those words, I must keep control. Her life might depend on it.
Slow your heart rate .
Find the air around you.
Clear your mind.
All of my training fails me. My pulse runs wild. My hands tremble at my sides. My mind tells me to look for the nearest object with the ability to disfigure him. “You didn’t kill her,” I say, my voice deceptively calm. “Vito wouldn’t just kill her.”
“If it were just to get to her, he wouldn’t have. But you are his target, not her. He wants to see you unravel. This woman was the only way to make that happen.” My fists clench. “She has always just been collateral damage.”
A bottle. A broken chair leg. A dull knife from the drawer. That damn hairbrush I can lodge in his narrow windpipe.
He shrugs. “It wasn’t personal. Not for me, at least.”
He has no proof he has her. None.
These are just empty words.
Bedlam overtakes my body. A loose cannon recognizes another, his eyes watching me roam the room with intense caution. He knows who I am.
Without her, I can become anything. Anyone.
“Looking for a weapon?”
He flashes the gun under his coat as if that will make me suddenly rethink my actions. My mouth thins, surveying the destroyed space as I lose myself, someone else taking over.
“I don’t need a weapon.”
Most men my size move slowly, hindered by muscle mass.
Men in my position have grown soft, often allowing others to do the difficult work.
Not me. I reach him before he can even grasp his gun, tearing him off his feet.
Crimson blood splatters as I pound his face with a closed fist, hearing something in his neck fissure from the whiplash.
He crashes into the wall, unable to recover as I’m right on top of him, seizing him again, denting the pristine wallpaper with his skull.
Clambering for his gun, my fingers peel his back, sliding it out of the holster. Barricading him to the wall, I lodge the muzzle at the base of his chin. “Cut the bullshit. This act you were sent here to play.”
He hasn’t recovered from the impact. When he manages to find my eyes, I already know what he sees, what makes him blanch—a monster.
The fucker is disturbed enough to grin, and the fractured heart of this monster instantly knows fear. “It would kill you, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t be able to take knowing you failed her. You sent her off on her own and let us find her?—”
What little control I had…
I lose it. Immediately.
He doesn’t have time to retaliate while I wail on him, discarding the gun to beat him with my bare hands. Dragging him off the ground, I search his disoriented expression.
You can’t kill him. Not until you find her.
“I could do this all day ,” I rage. “Make this easy. Give me what I want.” I'm desperate. I’ll make a deal with this piece of shit to get to her. “Vito doesn’t need to know.”
“There’s no deal to make, man. I told you.”
My hand dents the wall beside his face, a crater left in its wake. “ Liar !” I snarl, blood red rage blinding my vision.
He wouldn’t be here if she were gone.
He knows I’d kill him.
There has to be something else, something I'm missing.
Life, it somehow exists outside this room. Cars drive by, sounds of the television gradually fade into the background. At this moment, our silence becomes grave, more frightening than any threats he could convey. I shake my head, unable to believe it.
Vito wouldn’t order a hit on his daughter.
That’s too easy. He wouldn’t make it easy.
Dominic’s eyes struggle to stay open, even as we hear footsteps thundering up the stairs. Even as I realize I’m in a trap, I'm unable to move, waiting for him to concede .
“Tell me you didn’t,” I choke out.
Something like recognition crosses his features, stealing his condescending smile. Maybe he realizes he was right. That if she’s dead, I wouldn’t be able to live with it. That my very life is in his hands. When hands seize me, pulling me off of him, beating me into the ground, I let it happen.
He tells them to stop, spitting out blood, saliva, a molar.
“We will have our chance. It isn’t today,” he says, pulling himself off the ground.
Kneeling, I raise my eyes as the darkness clears. Who I am returns… A man who lives for one woman.
Leaving me amidst the destruction that was once hers, the men file out one by one. Dominic takes his time to reach the door. I hear something hit the floor, something solid, before he departs.
The fact that he’s still breathing doesn’t matter to me.
None of this does.
Not when I see the shine of a wedding band on the floor, attached to a broken chain.
My fingers tremble as I lift the wedding ring I placed in her hands nearly three years ago. My ring. The noise I make is what losing hope sounds like. It’s horrifying, weak. The blood dried on the white gold provokes an upsurge of nausea until I’m forcing bile down my throat.
This ring in his possession could only mean one thing.
He’s taken it from her.
He wasn’t lying.
My body begins to sway, only moving to prevent me from tearing my own skin off. Hate seeps in, but not towards Strata, Vito, or my father.
You won’t survive this.
My eyes close as my chest distends with the realization.
The agony settling in is more cruel than anything I’ve ever known. I never knew my body held such depths. It turns me against myself, against the world. Everything, all the memories that have fueled me, become regrets.
I should have never married her.
I should have stayed away.
I should have let her hate me.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I can’t reach to get it.
My eyes roam the room, utterly lost.
I'm lost to this world.
Without her, I don’t want it.